Biotic–Abiotic Interactions: Factors that Influence Peptide–Graphene Interactions

Understanding the factors that influence the interaction between biomolecules and abiotic surfaces is of utmost interest in biosensing and biomedical research. Through phage display technology, several peptides have been identified as specific binders to abiotic material surfaces, such as gold, graphene, silver, and so forth. Using graphene–peptide as our model abiotic–biotic pair, we investigate the effect of graphene quality, number of layers, and the underlying support substrate effect on graphene–peptide interactions using both experiments and computation. Our results indicate that graphene quality plays a significant role in graphene–peptide interactions. The graphene–biomolecule interaction appears to show no significant dependency on the number of graphene layers or the underlying support substrate