Abstract
Protein cages are an interesting class of biomaterials with potential applications in bionanotechnology. Therefore, substantial effort is spent on the development of capsule-forming designer polypeptides with a tailor-made assembly profile. The expanded assembly profile of a triblock copolypeptide consisting of a metal ion chelating hexahistidine-tag, a stimulus-responsive elastin-like polypeptide block, and a pH-responsive morphology-controlling viral capsid protein is presented. The self-assembly of this multi-responsive protein-based block copolymer is triggered by the addition of divalent metal ions. This assembly process yields monodisperse nanocapsules with a 20 nm diameter composed of 60 polypeptides. The well-defined nanoparticles are the result of the emergent properties of all the blocks of the polypeptide. These results demonstrate the feasibility of hexahistidine-tags to function as supramolecular cross-linkers. Furthermore, their potential for the metal ion-mediated encapsulation of hexahistidine-tagged proteins is shown.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 2476-2483 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | Small |
| Volume | 12 |
| Issue number | 18 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 11 May 2016 |
Keywords
- Block copolypeptides
- Elastin-like polypeptides
- Protein nanocapsules
- Self-assembly
- Virus-like particles
- 2023 OA procedure