Bacteriophages and nanostructured materials

Although people taking different approaches in the field of nanotechnology may target different size ranges, broadly, nanotechnology has the goal of creating structures in the 1-100 nm size range. This is the same size range that bacteriophages synthesize capsids. Bacteriophages also have the desirable property of self-fabrication or self-assembly--much of capsid structural assembly information is a function of the capsid proteins themselves rather than requiring other proteins. This would seem to make bacteriophage protein-based materials ideal for some nanotechnology applications. So far, the majority of research has taken one of two approaches: first, using filamentous bacteriophage display techniques to identify inorganic nanocrystal-binding peptides and using those peptides and the filamentous phage virions to create novel materials, and second, using a variety of bacteriophage and bacteriophage receptor-binding proteins to functionalize surfaces to create biosensors for bacterial detection. Here, I review these two approaches and speculate on some of the challenges for further development of bacteriophage protein-based self-assembling nanomaterials.