The icosahedron and the dodecahedron are the largest of the Platonic solids, and icosahedral protein structures are widely utilized in biological systems for packaging and transport1,2. There has been considerable interest in repurposing such structures3–5, for example, virus-like particles for the targeted delivery and vaccine design. The ability to design proteins that self assemble into precisely specified, highly ordered icosahedral structures would open the door to a new generation of protein 'containers' that could exhibit properties custom-made for various applications. In this manuscript, we describe the computational design of an icosahedral nano-cage that self-assembles from trimeric building blocks. Electron microscopy images of the designed protein expressed in E. coli reveals a homogenous population of icosahedral particles nearly identical to the design model. The particles are stable in 6.7 M guanidine hydrochloride at up to 80 °C, and undergo extremely abrupt, but reversible, disassembly between 2 M and 2.25 M guanidinium thiocyanate. The icosahedron is robust to genetic fusions: one or two copies of superfolder GFP can be fused to each of the 60 subunits to create highly fluorescent standard candles for light microscopy, and a designed protein pentamer can be placed in the center of each of the twenty pentameric faces to potentially gate macromolecule access to the nanocage interior. Such robust designed nanocages should have considerable utility for targeted drug delivery6, vaccine design7, and synthetic biology8.

Complex biological processes are often performed by self-organizing nanostructures comprising multiple classes of macromolecules, such as ribosomes (proteins and RNA) or enveloped viruses (proteins, nucleic acids, and lipids). Approaches have been developed for designing self-assembling structures consisting of either nucleic acids1,2 or proteins3–5, but strategies for engineering hybrid biological materials are only beginning to emerge6,7. Here, we describe the design of self-assembling protein nanocages that direct their own release from human cells inside small vesicles in a manner that resembles some viruses. We refer to these hybrid biomaterials as Enveloped Protein Nanocages (EPNs). Robust EPN biogenesis required protein sequence elements that encode three distinct functions: membrane binding, self-assembly, and recruitment of the Endosomal Sorting Complexes Required for Transport (ESCRT) machinery8. A variety of synthetic proteins with these functional elements induced EPN biogenesis, highlighting the modularity and generality of the design strategy. Biochemical and electron cryomicroscopic (cryo-EM) analyses revealed that one design, EPN-01, comprised small (~100 nm) vesicles containing multiple protein nanocages that closely matched the structure of the designed 60-subunit self-assembling scaffold9. EPNs that incorporated the vesicular stomatitis viral glycoprotein (VSV-G) could fuse with target cells and deliver their contents, thereby transferring cargoes from one cell to another. These studies show how proteins can be programmed to direct the formation of hybrid biological materials that perform complex tasks, and establish EPNs as a novel class of designed, modular, genetically-encoded nanomaterials that can transfer molecules between cells.

In recent years, new protein engineering methods have produced more than a dozen symmetric, self‐assembling protein cages whose structures have been validated to match their design models with near‐atomic accuracy. However, many protein cage designs that are tested in the lab do not form the desired assembly, and improving the success rate of design has been a point of recent emphasis. Here we present two protein structures solved by X‐ray crystallography of designed protein oligomers that form two‐component cages with tetrahedral symmetry. To improve on the past tendency toward poorly soluble protein, we used a computational protocol that favors the formation of hydrogen‐bonding networks over exclusively hydrophobic interactions to stabilize the designed protein–protein interfaces. Preliminary characterization showed highly soluble expression, and solution studies indicated successful cage formation by both designed proteins. For one of the designs, a crystal structure confirmed at high resolution that the intended tetrahedral cage was formed, though several flipped amino acid side chain rotamers resulted in an interface that deviates from the precise hydrogen‐bonding pattern that was intended. A structure of the other designed cage showed that, under the conditions where crystals were obtained, a noncage structure was formed wherein a porous 3D protein network in space group I213 is generated by an off‐target twofold homomeric interface. These results illustrate some of the ongoing challenges of developing computational methods for polar interface design, and add two potentially valuable new entries to the growing list of engineered protein materials for downstream applications.