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Updated: Jun 7, 2025

Formation of Ordered Biomolecular Structures by the Self-assembly of Short Peptides
Published on: November 21, 2013
Enantiomeric peptides self-assembling into fibrils with the same handedness
YongFang Zheng1, ShiXian Chen1, KeJing Mao1
1Fujian-Taiwan Science and Technology Cooperation Base of Biomedical Materials and Tissue Engineering, Engineering Research Center of Industrial Biocatalysis, Key Laboratory of OptoElectronic Science and Technology for Medicine of Ministry of Education, Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory of Polymer Materials, College of Chemistry and Materials Science, Fujian Normal University, 32 Shangsan Road, Fuzhou 350007, China. zhuhu@fjnu.edu.cn.
Abstract:
It is widely accepted that peptides with enantiomeric configurations would self-assemble into nanostructures with opposite supramolecular chirality. However, in this work, we found that the L-peptide polyphenylalanine F10 (FFFFFFFFFF) and its enantiomer f10 displayed mirror image CD spectra, yet both self-assembled into fibers with exclusive left-handedness, a phenomenon also observed in the other two enantiomeric pairs (F9f and f9F, F5f5 and f5F5). Our work provides new insights into the relationship between the molecular chirality of peptide building blocks and the supramolecular chirality of their self-assemblies.
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