Preliminary Research on the Interaction between a Novel Designed Self-Assembling Peptide with Half-Sequence Ionic Complement and the Natural Product Psoralen

This paper describes a new kind of 9-residue half-sequence ionic-complementary peptide P-X7-P, which can spontaneously self-assemble into well-ordered and long interconnected nanofibrilar network structure in pure water, and can be used as a hydrophobic compounds carrier. Psoralen, a natural product, is slight water soluble but has various treatments in medicine. In order to fully understand the interaction between the self-assembling peptide and psoralen,the nanostructures formed by two of them were characterized by atomic force microscopy (AFM), field-emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM). This work provides insights on the interaction between the amphiphilic self-assembling peptide and psoralen that are useful for the bottom up development of peptide sequence for local natural product drug delivery applications.