Abstract
Self‐assembling surfactant‐like peptides have been explored as emerging nanobiomaterials in recent years. These peptides are usually amphiphilic, typically possessing a hydrophobic moiety and a hydrophilic moiety. The structural characteristics can promote many peptide molecules to self‐assemble into various nanostructures. Furthermore, properties of peptide molecules such as charge distribution and geometrical shape could also alter the formation of the self‐assembling nanostructures. Based on their diverse self‐assembling behaviours and nanostructures, self‐assembling surfactant‐like peptides exhibit great potentials in many fields, including membrane protein stabilization, drug delivery, and tissue engineering. This review mainly focuses on recent advances in studying self‐assembling surfactant‐like peptides, introducing their designs and the potential applications in nanobiotechnology.
Highlights
Molecular self-assembly is a universal phenomenon in nature: phospholipid molecules can self-assemble into millimeter-size lipid tubules, silk fibroins can be fabricated into silk materials over 2 km in length [1], and so on
Molecular self-assembly is usually driven by noncovalent bonds such as ionic bond, hydrophobic interaction, van der Waals interaction, and hydrogen bonding, which could promote self-assembling molecules to spontaneously aggregate into well-ordered structures
Surfactants are usually a category of amphiphiles composed of hydrophobic tail and hydrophilic head
Summary
Molecular self-assembly is a universal phenomenon in nature: phospholipid molecules can self-assemble into millimeter-size lipid tubules, silk fibroins can be fabricated into silk materials over 2 km in length [1], and so on. Molecular self-assembly is usually driven by noncovalent bonds such as ionic bond, hydrophobic interaction, van der Waals interaction, and hydrogen bonding, which could promote self-assembling molecules to spontaneously aggregate into well-ordered structures. As a novel category of selfassembling nanomaterials, self-assembling peptides have become especially attractive, for their successful applications in many fields, including three-dimensional cell culture and reparative or regenerative medicine [2,3,4,5,6,7,8], tissue engineering [9,10,11], and drug release [12,13,14]. We will focus on a family of surfactant-like peptides designed by mimicking the structure of traditional surfactants and introduce their applications in biological surface engineering
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