Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: For many years, I was fascinated by the assembly of peptides into supersecondary structures, for example, coiled-coil dimers and collagen mimetic triple helices. Two graduate students in my group, David Przybyla and Marcos Pires, jolted me out of my reverie by pitching some ideas for higher-order assembly of these motifs in the mid-2000s. Our collaborative work produced peptide materials with a host of different morphologies, and I became entranced with the potential of peptides as biomaterial building blocks for regenerative medicine. This issue of Peptide Science, focused on peptide materials and their applications, is a clear demonstration that this field is thriving. The peptide motifs for hierarchical assembly are continuing to expand as seen in the Review by Medina and co-workers describing fluorous peptide building blocks (some of the amazing morphologies obtained are shown on the cover), my Review (Chmielewski and Curtis) in which we do a head-to-head comparison of metal-promoted higher-order assembly of coiled-coil and collagen mimetic peptides, Yan and co-workers' Review on the assembly of cyclic dipeptides and the Review by Lynn and co-workers describing a path for using disordered peptide domains for precise spatiotemporal assembly. Additionally, articles presenting new findings in the issue describe cell-compatible hydrogels formed from coiled-coil peptides (Koksch and co-workers), short self-assembling peptides with urea bonds (Mihara and co-workers) and tryptophan-rich peptides (Xu and co-workers). Other assembling motifs herein are dipeptide hydrazides (Ikeda and co-workers), dipeptides (Mandal and co-workers) and beta hairpin peptides (Wang et al.). Peptides are usually easy to obtain synthetically, therefore there is a growing body of work focused on engineering peptide materials for specific applications. For instance, in their Reviews in this issue, Nilsson and co-workers provide insights into chemical strategies for display signaling motifs on peptide materials, Montclare and co-workers demonstrate the use of peptides-based vehicles for gene delivery, and Thordarson and co-workers discuss nanoparticles that can be functionalized with dual peptide components. The wide-ranging nature of peptides is also highlighted in the primary research work describing their practical use. Applications as diverse as forming charge-transfer complexes using a peptide nanotube scaffold (Uji and co-workers) to modulation of base pairing with cyclic peptide-oligonucleotide conjugates (Lim and co-workers) are detailed within. In their work, Smith-Carpenter and co-workers focus on peptide nanofibers, demonstrating the tunable ability to display thiol groups on the surface of the nanofibers as a means to label supramolecular surfaces. Overall, the area of peptide-based materials is a rapidly growing area, and the Reviews and primary research articles contained herein well document this burgeoning field.
Source: Peptide Science
DOI: 10.1002/pep2.24226
Author: Jean Chmielewski
Institution: Purdue University West Lafayette
Language: English
Subfield: Biomaterials
Field: Materials Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W3151776551