Imagine if you could make a “designer flypaper” that targets not flies, but viruses, bacteria and other pathogens. That’s the promise of a new process for creating ultrathin, self-assembling sheets of synthetic materials with selective binding properties that can detect or inactivate pathogens.

Developed by a research team led by the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), the process yields 2D nanosheets that make use of bio-inspired polymers known as peptoids. The sheets present patterns of simple sugars along their surfaces, effectively mimicking cell surfaces. The researchers demonstrated the sheets’ ability to bind with selective proteins -- including the Shiga toxin, which causes dysentery.

“It's like Velcro, with a bunch of little loops that converge on the target protein together," explains Ronald Zuckermann, a scientist at Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry who led the study. "Now we can mimic a nanoscale feature that is ubiquitous in biology."

Indeed, numerous pathogens, from the flu virus to cholera bacteria, bind to sugars on cell surfaces. By picking the right sugars in the right distributions for their nanosheets, the team can determine which pathogens will be drawn in.

"The chemistry we're doing is very modular," Zuckermann says. "We can 'click on' different sugars, and present them on a well-defined, planar surface. We can control how far apart they are from each other. We can do this with pretty much any sugar."

The nanosheets, which are made in a liquid solution, could be used to protect someone from being exposed to a pathogen; Zuckermann says he could envision deploying the technology through use of a nasal spray. They could also potentially be used in environmental cleanups to neutralize specific toxins and pathogens.

In their latest study, the researchers embedded a fluorescent dye in the sheets and attached another dye on the target protein in order to confirm that the bindings were successful.

The research appears in the journal ACS Nano.