Apoferritin Amyloid-Fibril Directed the In Situ Assembly and/or Synthesis of Optical and Magnetic Nanoparticles Jurado, Rocío Gálvez Rodríguez, Natividad Amyloid fibrils Apoferritin protein B -lactoglobulin Magnetic nanoparticle Gold nanoparticles MRI and optical imaging Bionanomaterials The coupling of proteins that can assemble, recognise or mineralise specific inorganic species is a promising strategy for the synthesis of nanoscale materials with a controllable morphology and functionality. Herein, we report that apoferritin protein amyloid fibrils (APO) have the ability to assemble and/or synthesise various metal and metal compound nanoparticles (NPs). As such, we prepared metal NP–protein hybrid bioconjugates with improved optical and magnetic properties by coupling diverse gold (AuNPs) and magnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (MNPs) to apoferritin amyloid fibrils and compared them to the well-known -lactoglobulin (BLG) protein. In a second approach, we used of solvent-exposed metal-binding residues in APO amyloid fibrils as nanoreactors for the in situ synthesis of gold, silver (AgNPs) and palladium nanoparticles (PdNPs). Our results demonstrate, the versatile nature of the APO biotemplate and its high potential for preparing functional hybrid bionanomaterials. Specifically, the use of apoferritin fibrils as vectors to integrate magnetic MNPs or AuNPs is a promising synthetic strategy for the preparation of specific contrast agents for early in vivo detection using various bioimaging techniques. 2021-03-10T09:38:32Z 2021-03-10T09:38:32Z 2021-01-08 info:eu-repo/semantics/article Jurado, R.; Gálvez, N. Apoferritin Amyloid-Fibril Directed the In Situ Assembly and/or Synthesis of Optical and Magnetic Nanoparticles. Nanomaterials 2021, 11, 146. [https://doi.org/10.3390/nano11010146] http://hdl.handle.net/10481/67044 10.3390/nano11010146 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Atribución 3.0 España Mdpi