Using small angle scattering (SAS) to structurally characterise peptide and protein self-assembled materials

Abstract

In the past 20 years protein and peptide self-assembly has attracted material scientists’ interest due to the possibility to exploit such molecular mechanism to create novel biomaterials including hydrogels. One of the main challenges when dealing with “soft” biological materials is their structural and morphological characterisation. Small angle scattering (SAS) can be a highly complementary tool to microscopy for the characterisation of such materials as it allows the investigation of samples in their wet-state without the need for any sample preparation such as drying and/or freezing. In this tutorial review we introduce briefly the SAS technique to the non-expert and through selected examples from the literature show how SAS can be readily used thanks to existing analytical approaches developed by a number of authors to extract structural information on the self-assembly of peptide and proteins.