| Abstract
| - Highly oriented monolayers of bacteriorhodopsin (BR) in purple membrane (PM) form are obtained by the reactionof BR-Q3C, where a cysteine was introduced into the N-terminal region, with a gold surface. Single molecule forcespectroscopy was used to show that about 50% of the BRs are covalently bound to the surface. The linkage betweenthe cysteine and the gold causes an additional characteristic peak in the force−distance curves to appear. Becauseseveral thousand cysteine−gold bonds exist between each PM patch and the surface, the PM is irreversibly bound.Such oriented PM monolayers may serve as an interface between metal surfaces and biomaterials, which may be linkedto the PM surface chemically. Photoelectric applications of BR will benefit from the high degree of orientation obtainedby this method.
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