Artificial structural proteins: Synthesis, assembly and material applications

Ming Li; Jingjing Li; Kai Liu; Hongjie Zhang

doi:10.1016/j.bioorg.2024.107162

Artificial structural proteins: Synthesis, assembly and material applications

Bioorg Chem. 2024 Mar:144:107162. doi: 10.1016/j.bioorg.2024.107162. Epub 2024 Jan 29.

Authors

Ming Li¹, Jingjing Li², Kai Liu³, Hongjie Zhang³

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Rare Earth Resource Utilization, Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun 130022, China; School of Applied Chemistry and Engineering, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China.
² State Key Laboratory of Rare Earth Resource Utilization, Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun 130022, China. Electronic address: jjingli@ciac.ac.cn.
³ State Key Laboratory of Rare Earth Resource Utilization, Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun 130022, China; School of Applied Chemistry and Engineering, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China; Engineering Research Center of Advanced Rare Earth Materials, Ministry of Education, Department of Chemistry, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.

PMID: 38308999
DOI: 10.1016/j.bioorg.2024.107162

Abstract

Structural proteins have evolved over billions of years and offer outstanding mechanical properties, such as resilience, toughness and stiffness. Advances in modular protein engineering, polypeptide modification, and synthetic biology have led to the development of novel biomimetic structural proteins to perform in biomedical and military fields. However, the development of customized structural proteins and assemblies with superior performance remains a major challenge, due to the inherent limitations of biosynthesis, difficulty in mimicking the complexed macroscale assembly, etc. This review summarizes the approaches for the design and production of biomimetic structural proteins, and their chemical modifications for multiscale assembly. Furthermore, we discuss the function tailoring and current applications of biomimetic structural protein assemblies. A perspective of future research is to reveal how the mechanical properties are encoded in the sequences and conformations. This review, therefore, provides an important reference for the development of structural proteins-mimetics from replication of nature to even outperforming nature.

Keywords: Biomimetics; Chemical modification; Macroscale assembly; Modular engineering; Structural protein.

Publication types

Review
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Biomimetic Materials* / chemistry
Peptides / chemistry
Proteins

Substances

Proteins
Peptides