Self-Assembled Monolayers characterisation

C. Vericat, M. E. Vela, G. A. Benitez, J. A. M. Gago, X. Torrelles and R. C. Salvarezza, Surface characterisation of sulfur and alkanethiol self-assembled monolayers on Au(lll), J. Phys. Condens. Matter, 2006, 18, R867. 

The research topic of self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) has grown tremendously in synthetic sophistication and depth of characterisation over the past 20 years [1]. Functionalised self-assembled monolayers [2,3] have attracted the attention of many scientists because of their potential applications in chemical sensors [4-6], biosensors [7,8], NLO-systems [9-13], molecular switches [8,14-19], molecular electronics [20-25], photovoltaic... 

Drobny et al. have reported solid-state NMR experiments that provide information on the structures of surface-immobilised peptides. The peptides were covalently bound to alkanethiolates that are self-assembled as monolayers on colloidal gold nanoparticles. The secondary structure of the immobilised peptides was characterised by quantifying the Ramachandran angles (j) and /. 

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