(Correspondent: Wen Hu and Binzheng Zhao) Recently, Professor Yang Rusen's team of the School of Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, together withTel Aviv Universityand other cooperative universities, published the latest finding,Bioinspired Stable and Photoluminescent Assemblies for Power Generation,in Advanced Materials(Impact Factor is 21.95),top international journal in field of materials. The review described how to use peptide biomaterials to harvest external energy efficiently. Professor Yang Rusen is the corresponding author (co-corresponding author), Associate Professor Hu Wen is the lead author (co-lead author), Xidian University is the second communication unit.

Polypeptide materials have great potential for application and development in the field of environmental energy collection due to their biocompatibility, precise and controllable morphologies, flexibility and easy processing and preparation. However, peptide assemblies require further development and study. The review showed tryptophan based peptide cyclo-glycine-tryptophan (cyclo-GW) which is mechanically robust and thermally stable up to 370 °C. As a dimer, cyclo-GW exhibits a energy gap narrower than the monomer, so it has the property of long-term stable visible light-emitting.As cyclo-GW has non centrosymmetric polar structure, Professor Yang Rucen's team utilized density functional theory to mimic cyclo-GW, and found that cyclo-GW has high piezoelectric coefficient. Then the team fabricated a nanogenerator of cyclo-GW and demonstratedthe feasibility of utilizingcyclo-GWfor fabrication of devices that combine high structural stability, high effciency and significant energy harvesting properties.The nanogenerator canproduce a high and sustained open-circuit voltage (1.2 V). The findings oncyclo-GW of Professor Yang Rusen’s team pointed out the development trend of wide temperature energy acquisition devices and optoelectronic integrated micro devices for piezoelectric sensors.

Link to the paper:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.201807481