Designed α-helical Tectons For Constructing Multicomponent Syntheticbiological Systems

摘要

One route to develop new synthetic-biological systems is to assemble discrete nanoscale objects from programmed peptide-based building blocks, or tectons. This would require tectons that exhibit high fidelity interactions with specified partners, and the potential to be functionalized. Such a set of peptidic building blocks could be used to create more-complex assemblies analogous to the way that DNA has been used design a wide range of 2D and 3D nanostructures. While DNA-based assemblies have reached the level of sophistication to allow control of structure and even motion, the use of peptidic building blocks is far less advanced. This is because the rules relating peptide sequence to structure are less well established than the exquisite specificity of base pairing in DNA. Although the design of peptidic tectons is more difficult, the potential benefits include ease of production, functionalization, and versatility. Here we present an algorithm to search coiled-coil specificity space, along with a few modest multicomponent structures to demonstrate our ability to build peptide-based nano-structures from the bottom up.