Bio‐adhesive Nanoporous Module: Toward Autonomous Gating

Abstract

Here we report a bio-adhesive porous organic module (GlueCOF) composed of hexagonally packed 1D nanopores based on a covalent organic framework. The nanopores are densely decorated with guanidinium ion (Gu+) pendants capable of forming salt bridges with oxyanionic species. GlueCOF strongly adheres to biopolymers through multivalent salt-bridging interactions with their ubiquitous oxyanionic species. By taking advantage of its strong bio-adhesive nature, we succeeded in creating a gate that possibly opens the nanopores through a selective interaction with a reporter chemical and releases guest molecules. We chose calmodulin (CaM) as a gating component that can stably entrap a loaded guest, sulforhodamine B (SRB), within the nanopores (CaMCOF⊃SRB). CaM is known to change its conformation on binding with Ca2+ ions. We confirmed that mixing CaMCOF⊃SRB with Ca2+ resulted in the release of SRB from the nanopores, whereas the use of weakly binding Mg2+ ions resulted in a much slower release of SRB.