Issue 30, 2016

Designing the structure and folding pathway of modular topological bionanostructures

Abstract

Polypeptides and polynucleotides are programmable natural polymers whose linear sequence can be easily designed and synthesized by the cellular transcription/translation machinery. Nature primarily uses proteins as the molecular machines and nucleic acids as the medium for the manipulation of heritable information. A protein's tertiary structure and function is defined by multiple cooperative weak long-range interactions that have been optimized through evolution. DNA nanotechnology uses orthogonal pairwise interacting modules of complementary nucleic acids as a strategy to construct defined complex 3D structures. A similar approach has recently been applied to protein design, using orthogonal dimerizing coiled-coil segments as interacting modules. When concatenated into a single polypeptide chain, they self-assemble into the 3D structure defined by the topology of interacting modules within the chain. This approach allows the construction of geometric polypeptide scaffolds, bypassing the folding problem of compact proteins by relying on decoupled pairwise interactions. However, the folding pathway still needs to be optimized in order to allow rapid self-assembly under physiological conditions. Again the modularity of designed topological structures can be used to define the rules that guide the folding pathway of long polymers, such as DNA, based on the stability and topology of connected building modules. This approach opens the way towards incorporation of designed foldamers in biological systems and their functionalization.

Graphical abstract: Designing the structure and folding pathway of modular topological bionanostructures

  • This article is part of the themed collection: Foldamers

Article information

Article type
Feature Article
Submitted
15 jan 2016
Accepted
15 mar 2016
First published
15 mar 2016
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY-NC license

Chem. Commun., 2016,52, 5220-5229

Author version available

Designing the structure and folding pathway of modular topological bionanostructures

A. Ljubetič, I. Drobnak, H. Gradišar and R. Jerala, Chem. Commun., 2016, 52, 5220 DOI: 10.1039/C6CC00421K

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