Confinement of Assemblies of Peptides by Chemical Reactions in Living Cells

Abstract

The self-assembly of peptides plays an important role in optics, catalysis, medicine, and disease treatment. In recent years, peptide-based materials have exhibited great potential for cancer therapy and disease imaging due to their excellent biocompatibility, structural tenability, and ease of functionality. Peptides could self-assemble into diverse nanostructures in vivo triggered by endogenous stimuli, which initiated chemical reactions and self-assembled to achieve desired biological functions in the tumor microenvironment.This concept introduces the utilization of endogenous triggers to construct functional nanostructures in vivo and their corresponding biological applications. After briefly discussing the representative example of chemical reactions induced self-assembly of peptides in the living system, we describe the several stimuli triggered self-assembly for constructing therapeutic assemblies and serving as an imaging probe. Finally, we give a brief outlook to discuss the future direction of this exciting new field.

Advances in Self-Assembled Peptides as Drug Carriers

“…Polypeptides can self-assemble into a variety of nanostructures not only under endogenous stimuli such as pH, enzymes, etc. [ 82 ], but also by using external physical stimuli such as light, ultrasound, magnetic fields, etc. Li et al designed a multi-component ligand self-assembly strategy based on combining peptides, photosensitizers and metal ions to construct metallo-nanodrugs for antitumor therapy.…”