Peptides are short chains of amino acids.
Joining biological to semiconducting materials is the first step to a whole new materials assembly technique that will operate on the nanoscale. Most semiconducting devices such as computer chips are made from the top down, meaning that substance is subtracted from a bulk material to make a chip. Patterns are imposed on the material and etched into it. The new technique aims at building from the bottom up, i.e., atom by atom or molecule by molecule. Another author is Angela Belcher, who received her Ph.D. in chemistry from UCSB in 1997 and who as a postdoctoral fellow at UCSB teamed up with Hu to initiate the research that led to the published results.