Exploring phage engineering to advance nanobiotechnology

Phage is a human-safe bacteria-infecting virus assembled from proteins and nucleic acids, enabling it to be genetically engineered to display functional peptides or proteins. It is also a biological nanomaterial that can be assembled into ordered nanostructured materials, laying the foundation for advancing nanobiotechnology. Phage, alone or in combination with non-biological nanomaterials, has been employed to develop new nanobiotechnologies for applications such as biosensing, drug and gene delivery, cancer therapy, vaccinations, tissue regeneration, antibacterial treatment, energy storage and generation, and higher-ordered materials assembly. This review summarizes the structure and biology of phage both as a biomacromolecule and as a nano-biomaterial. It also critically discusses the nanobiotechnological applications of phage and the challenges in this field. The current advancements of phage-based nanobiotechnology, as represented by those applications, demonstrate that phage can find unexplored applications in materials science, nanotechnology, energy, and medicine due to its unique properties such as genetic display of peptides or proteins and uniform size and shape.