Biologically templated organic polymers with nanoscale order

Methods for the construction of ordered nanoscale arrays have been implicated in fields ranging from separation technologies to microelectronics. Yet, despite the plethora of nanoscale structures assembled in nature that use a templating strategy, chemists have been unable to replicate this success. A technology is reported for templated organic polymers composed of filamentous bacteriophage-polyacrylamide biomacromolecules that self-assemble into highly ordered helical bundles displaying hexagonal close packing. The results align with a previously reported mathematical prediction for the close packing of flexible tubes. This biopolymeric assembly can be viewed as a magnification of the inherent microscopic chirality and helicity present in individual phage particles at the macroscale level.