Archives of Advances in Biosciences

Abstract

       Bacteriorhodopsin (BR) is the light harvesting and photoactive proton pump found in the membrane of a salt marsh bacteria. This protein has significant potential to use in optical computing and memory devices due to unique intrinsic physical properties of photo and bioelectric. All these features make BR one of the most promising protein candidates in protein memories. Protein memory is a kind of optical memory with a large storage capacity and high speed processing features. BR protein was used with the polymer film in order to create better stability. In order to investigate immobilization of electrostatic self-assembly of BR on glass and polycarbonate as protein memories was used. Polycarbonate is a layer of compact disc (CD) structure which considered dye immobilized on its surface and have reading and writing abilities of information via 0,1 bites. In this study, surfaces of polycarbonate modified by the mixture of 5% sulfuric acid and 20% acetic acid; furthermore, by using of PEI as cationic resin the surface of polycarbonate was charged and BR immobilized on it electrostatically. The modified surfaces were characterized by AFM technique. Also, light activity for reading data is retained. This is an appropriate method for optimal stability and activity assay of the protein and also is suitable for preparation of protein memories.