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Fabrication of novel biomaterials through molecular self-assembly

Nature Biotechnology volume 21, pages 1171–1178 (2003)Cite this article

Abstract

Two complementary strategies can be used in the fabrication of molecular biomaterials. In the 'top-down' approach, biomaterials are generated by stripping down a complex entity into its component parts (for example, paring a virus particle down to its capsid to form a viral cage). This contrasts with the 'bottom-up' approach, in which materials are assembled molecule by molecule (and in some cases even atom by atom) to produce novel supramolecular architectures. The latter approach is likely to become an integral part of nanomaterials manufacture and requires a deep understanding of individual molecular building blocks and their structures, assembly properties and dynamic behaviors. Two key elements in molecular fabrication are chemical complementarity and structural compatibility, both of which confer the weak and noncovalent interactions that bind building blocks together during self-assembly. Using natural processes as a guide, substantial advances have been achieved at the interface of nanomaterials and biology, including the fabrication of nanofiber materials for three-dimensional cell culture and tissue engineering, the assembly of peptide or protein nanotubes and helical ribbons, the creation of living microlenses, the synthesis of metal nanowires on DNA templates, the fabrication of peptide, protein and lipid scaffolds, the assembly of electronic materials by bacterial phage selection, and the use of radiofrequency to regulate molecular behaviors.

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Figure 1: Fabrication of various peptide materials.
Figure 2: Self-assembling peptides form a three-dimensional scaffold woven from nanofibers ∼10 nm in diameter.
Figure 3: Lipid, peptide and protein scaffold nanowires.
Figure 4: Microlenses and fiber-optics fabricated from protein scaffolds.
Figure 5: Metal nanocrystal–coupled biomolecule DNA.

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Acknowledgements

I thank Hidenori Yokoi for helping to organize the figures and Steve Santoso for critically reading the manuscript. I would also like to thank members of my laboratory, past and present, for making discoveries and conducting exciting research. I gratefully acknowledge the support by grants from the US Army Research Office, Office of Naval Research, Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (BioComputing), DARPA/Naval Research Labs; NSF-MIT BPEC and NSF CCR-0122419 to the MIT Media Lab's Center for Bits & Atoms; the US National Institutes of Health; the Whitaker Foundation; the DuPont–MIT Alliance; and Menicon, Ltd., Japan. The author also acknowledges the Intel Corp. for its educational donation of a computing cluster to the Center for Biomedical Engineering at MIT.

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  1. Center for Biomedical Engineering NE47-379 and Center for Bits & Atoms, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, 02139-4307, Massachusetts, USA

    Shuguang Zhang

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Zhang, S. Fabrication of novel biomaterials through molecular self-assembly. Nat Biotechnol 21, 1171–1178 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt874

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