Folding and Assembly of Metal-Linked Peptidic Nanostructures

Summary Folding and assembly are intra- and inter-molecular processes, respectively, for spontaneously generating predetermined, well-defined molecular structures. Though the cooperative processes of these mechanisms have been studied in coiled coils and β-sheets, they have been seldom utilized simultaneously in the synthetic fields. We have been developing a new folding-and-assembly (F&A) strategy, in which the folding and metal-directed self-assembly of a short peptide fragment occur simultaneously by helping and inducing the processes of each other. Depending on the sequence design, each short peptide ligand exhibits a specific conformation during metal coordination and simultaneously assembles into an advanced nanostructure, which has been hardly achieved by known synthetic strategies. The concepts, examples of the F&A strategy, the function of the obtained structures as well as future directions are disclosed in this perspective.