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.