Rationally designed chimeric solid-binding peptides for tailoring solid interfaces

Joining biology with materials science requires the ability to design, engineer and control biology/solid-state materials interfaces at the molecular level. The specific molecular interactions that take place among biomolecules, known as molecular recognition, enable all aspects of molecular processes in living systems prerequisite to the biological functions. Having the ability to establish specific biological interactions between the solid materials and biological constituents is essential for precise design of biologically viable soft interfaces that are molecularly tailored at solid surfaces. Solid-binding peptides offer excellent opportunities in surface biofunctionalization over the traditionally utilized chemical approaches which generally make use of covalent bonds for surface molecular attachments with limited flexibility. Solid-binding peptides are selected using directed evolution techniques using genotype to phenotype relationships and therefore referred also as genetically engineered peptides for inorganics (GEPI) and exclusively bind to solid materials using molecular recognition. Here, the peptide has weak interactions at multiple contact points that are established between the biomolecule and the solid lattice, and then folds into a conformation coherent with the underlying solid lattice through self-organization on the surface. Solid-binding peptides provide an unprecedented biological advantage as modular building blocks to couple biological and synthetic entities at the bio–solid interfaces. Taking full advantage of biology's versatility, they can easily be engineered to form chimeric molecules with inherent multifunctionality displaying biofunctional molecular entities, such as enzymes, co-factors, antimicrobial peptides, antibodies, nucleic acids and molecular probes that target biomarkers. This minireview provides an insight into the key principles of solid-binding peptides for advancing surfaces biofunctionalization by a selected set of examples on chimeric functions built upon linking, displaying and assembling functional molecular moieties at solid surfaces ranging from enzymatic biocatalysis to antimicrobial coatings. Modular multifunctional peptide design offers to tune molecular processes with coupled biological functions for a wide variety of applications in biotechnology, nanotechnology and medicine.