Control of Gold Nanoparticle-Protein Aggregates in Albumen Matrix for Configurable Switching Devices

Abstract

Protein-nanoparticle (P-NP) interactions are of great importance in the biomedical applications, and are extensively studied for biotechnology and biomedicine applications, for example, cancer therapy, drug delivery, as well as biosafety area. Here, it is shown that P-NP interactions can have applications as resistive memory. It is demonstrated that the nature of resistive switching changes from programmable memory to read-only memory when the NPs aggregate in the protein. The memory properties can be tuned by just changing the degree of agglomeration in P-NP solutions, so it has great potential to be used in configurable memory devices. This type of memory is also biocompatible, because it uses natural protein.