Rationally Designed Protein Building Blocks for Programmable Hierarchical Architectures

Diverse natural/artificial proteins have been used as building blocks to construct a variety of well-ordered nanoscale structures over the past couple of decades. Sophisticated protein self-assemblies have attracted great scientific interests due to their potential applications in disease diagnosis,...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wenbo Zhang, Shanshan Mo, Mingwei Liu, Lei Liu, Lanlan Yu, Chenxuan Wang
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2020-10-01
Series:Frontiers in Chemistry
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fchem.2020.587975/full
Description
Summary:Diverse natural/artificial proteins have been used as building blocks to construct a variety of well-ordered nanoscale structures over the past couple of decades. Sophisticated protein self-assemblies have attracted great scientific interests due to their potential applications in disease diagnosis, illness treatment, biomechanics, bio-optics and bio-electronics, etc. This review outlines recent efforts directed to the creation of structurally defined protein assemblies including one-dimensional (1D) strings/rings/tubules, two-dimensional (2D) planar sheets and three-dimensional (3D) polyhedral scaffolds. We elucidate various innovative strategies for manipulating proteins to self-assemble into desired architectures. The emergent applications of protein assemblies as versatile platforms in medicine and material science with improved performances have also been discussed.
ISSN:2296-2646