Nanostructures of beta-sheet peptides: steps towards bioactive functional materials

The design and construction of synthetic self-assembled nanostructures is, in a large part, inspired from elaborate nanostructures in biological systems. If we look at it from another angle, the self-assembled nanostructures are excellent scaffolds for exploring and modulating biological phenomena when they are suitably functionalized with bioactive molecules. Of the many types of molecular building blocks for self-assembly, peptide-based building blocks have the advantage in that their constituent amino acids are biocompatible and the sequence space of peptide chains is vast. This contribution highlights an emerging approach to the biomaterial application of artificially designed and functional beta-sheet peptide self-assemblies.