Carbon Dioxide Capture by Computationally Designed Self-Assembled Amyloid Biomaterials

Abstract

Various materials capturing CO₂ have been developed for addressing the threat of climate change. Recently, physical adsorbents are proposed as strong alternatives for conventional chemical absorbents with high regeneration energy; however, the former usually has an issue of low stability especially in humid condition. Herein, it is shown that amyloid biomaterials from novel computational design are effectual for CO₂ capture. After the computational design and validation using in-house protocol to capture multiple CO₂ molecules per peptide, self-assembling amyloid biomaterials are fabricated from promising peptides. Breakthrough measurement articulates that the biomaterials can selectively capture carbon dioxide over nitrogen. Unit CO₂ uptake demonstrates that computational approach on the mechanism of CO₂ capture is compatible with experimental result. 100℃ is sufficient temperature to regenerate the biomaterials, where the additional vacuum swing can be supportive. Computational secondary structural analysis verifies that designed peptides inherently retain stable structure rich in β-sheets. All the results show that proposed biomaterials are strong alternative, and the novel computational method can be the new criterion for CO₂ adsorbent design.