Virus Crystals as Nanocomposite Scaffolds

Patterning the nanostructure of monolithic solids to make ordered motifs is a powerful tool for material design. Several chemical strategies for generating such materials rely on porous templates. Block copolymers and colloidal crystals are two such examples of templates used to generate long-range three-dimensional ordered materials.1-3 While versatile in many ways, these templates offer only a limited number of architectures which can restrict their potential use. In particular, for optical applications crystal sym-metries which are more complex than close-packed spheres or cylinders are required.4 Biological templates, in contrast, provide a much wider variety of porous architectures and symmetries. Here we show that biological macromolecules in their crystalline state can be treated much like other monolithic templates and are effective at generating ordered solids of nanostructured materials. Protein and virus crystals have traditionally played a pivotal rol