Design of molecular biological materials using peptide motifs

Abstract

Two complementary fabrication technologies are employed in the production of materials and tools. In the ‘top-down’ approach, materials and tools are manufactured by stripping down an entity into its parts, e.g. carve a boat from a tree trunk. This contrasts sharply with the ‘bottom-up’ approach, in which materials and tools are assembled bit by bit to produce supra-structures and architectures, e.g. build a ship using wood strips. The bottom-up approach is likely to become an integral part of materials manufacture in the coming decades. This approach requires a deep understanding of individual molecular building blocks, their structures, assembling properties and dynamic behaviors. Two key elements in molecular materials manufacture are chemical complementarity and structural compatibility, both of which confer the weak and noncovalent interactions that bind building blocks together during self-assembly. Following Nature's leads, significant advances have been made at the interface of materials chemistry and biology, including the design of helical ribbons, peptide nanofiber scaffolds for three-dimensional cell cultures and tissue engineering, peptide surfactants, peptide detergents for solubilizing, stabilizing and crystallizing diverse types of membrane proteins and their complexes.