Self-Assembly of Peptide Amphiphiles: Molecularly Engineered Bionanomaterials

Abstract

Molecular self-assembly is ubiquitous in nature and has now emerged as a new approach in chemical synthesis, engineering, nanotechnology, polymer science, and materials. Molecular self-assembly has been attracting increasing interest from the scientific community in the recent years due to its importance in understanding biology and a variety of diseases at the molecular level. In the last few years, considerable advances have been made in the use of peptides as building blocks to produce biological materials for wide range of applications, including fabricating novel supra-molecular structures and scaffolding for tissue repair. Today, the study of biological self-assembly systems represent a significant advance in the molecular engineering and is a rapidly growing scientific and engineering field that crosses the boundaries of existing disciplines. Many self-assembling systems are range from bi-and tri-block copolymers to complex DNA structures as well as simple and complex proteins and peptides. The attractiveness of such bottom-up processes lies in their capability to build uniform, functional units or arrays and the possibility to exploit such structures at meso-and macroscopic scale for life and non-life science applications.