Design and construction of self-assembling supramolecular protein complexes using artificial and fusion proteins as nanoscale building blocks

•Several recent approaches for designing artificial self-assembling protein complexes.•This review focuses on biotechnological strategies of artificial and fusion proteins.•These nanoscale building blocks self-assemble into supramolecular nanobiomaterials.•The nanobiotechnologies facilitate the development of novel functional biomaterials.

The central goal of nanobiotechnology is to design and construct novel biomaterials of nanometer sizes. In this short review, we describe recent progress of several approaches for designing and creating artificial self-assembling protein complexes and primarily focus on the following biotechnological strategies for using artificial and fusion proteins as nanoscale building blocks: fusion proteins designed for symmetrical self-assembly; three-dimensional domain-swapped oligomers; self-assembling designed coiled-coil peptide modules; metal-directed self-assembling engineered proteins; computationally designed self-assembling de novo proteins; and self-assembling protein nanobuilding blocks (PN-Blocks) using an intermolecularly folded dimeric de novo protein. These state-of-the-art nanobiotechnologies for designing supramolecular protein complexes will facilitate the development of novel functional nanobiomaterials.

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