Figure 1
From: Engineering building blocks for self-assembling protein nanoparticles
Self-assembling peptide sequences (yellow boxes) are usually identified from nature, obtained by trial-and-error protein engineering approaches or isolated from combinatorial libraries. Peptides can be produced in microbial cells as tandem repeats or fused to carrier proteins for further recovery and isolation by proteolysis. Eventually, self-assembling peptides can be produced as fused to multifunctional proteins (blue), to generate self-organizing artificial viruses. Ideally, the assembling of both single peptides and more complex protein building blocks into supramolecular constructs should be controlled in vitro by simple physicochemical parameters, to permit the incorporation of the cargo drug (in red).