3. Nanostructure Synthesis with Viral Biotemplates for Diverse Applications
Nanostructures are increasingly sought to create advanced materials that improve electrical conductivity and capacitance, current generation, catalytic activity, and detection sensitivity [3, 5, 19, 46, 47]. These applications benefit from high aspect ratio nanomaterials that can be biotemplated on TMV, BSMV or their VLPs. However, each application relies on distinct metals whose unique electronic structure is key to enabling these applications; e.g. metal with high conductivity such as copper is used in conductive nanowires while gold is relatively inert making it an ideal substrate for a sensor [19, 48]. Moreover, the precise function of the nanomaterial in these roles relies on their incorporation into devices with unique architectures (Figure 2). To enable the synthesis of these nanomaterials, the viral biotemplates are modified and processed in innovative ways; we describe only a handful below.