Sustainable and functional nanomaterials from peptide self-assembly

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In nature, sophisticated materials and structures are formed through self-assembly, a process where chemically simple building blocks form complex arrays of biomolecules functioning cooperatively in living systems. This phenomenon has inspired a sustained research effort to elucidate the basic physical principles which govern self-assembly and the nature of the structures that emerge from this process. A particularly exciting area of application is the ability to generate new types of materials from biologically sourced and biodegradable peptide building blocks. The project will focus on three key themes:- Tailoring the self-assembly process to generate potentially technologically useful materials. We can achieve this by using microfluidics to control the micro scale architectures to generate microcapsules, or structures with photonic activity or structural colour. Crucially we can achieve these properties without affecting the biodegradability of the materials by relying on new supra-molecular assemblies of biological and biologically-derived peptide building blocks and utilising non-covalent interactions to organise the building blocks in space.- Understanding the fundamental processes which peptide self-assembly takes place and how it can be influenced. A particularly exciting recent area of research is exploring and exploiting liquid-liquid phase separation as a precursor to help nucleate specific morphologies form peptide species.- Using peptide structures as scaffolds for mineralisation and recruiting inorganic components. This strategy is exploited by many biological organisms to generate highly robust materials and can be implemented in an artificial setting with fully biodegradable materials such as silica, an abundant mineral that occurs naturally.