Peptide-Based Functional Integration Engineering

Ordered supramolecular organisation structures comprised of metabolic small molecules, such as short peptides, participate in most of the natural biological activities. Learning from nature, biomimicry of these natural structures will facilitate the fabrication of eco-friendly functional integrations assembled by simple bio-organic building blocks. The flexible and unique properties of the short peptides self-assemblies can be utilized for numerous bio/nano technological applications, such as the construction of soft, smart bio-organic optoelectronic devices. In addition, the intrinsic biocompatibility of the assemblies can bridge the integrating engineering and the biological world. Studies in this area can facilitate the clarification of the roles of short peptides aggregation in physiology and pathology. This may allow monitoring and sensing of a wide variety of metabolic activities, as well as analysis, and possibly interference, of the biological system, by rational design of biomimetic engineering. With these goals in mind, the short peptides integration systems can provide a promising technological tool for fundamental biology, biomedicine, bionanotechnology and advanced device engineering studies. This talk will introduce our accumulated progress on biomimetic integration engineering, emphasising the design, preparation and self-assembly characterization of metabolite organizations, especially short peptides self-assemblies. Subsequently, our findings regarding their diverse physicochemical properties, including optical, mechanical, electric, semiconductive and piezoelectric behaviours, will be presented. Simultaneously, our ongoing studies and future plans will also be discussed.