Natural supramolecular building blocks: from virus coat proteins to viral nanoparticles

Abstract

Viruses belong to a fascinating class of natural supramolecular structures, composed of multiple copies of coat proteins (CPs) that assemble into different shapes with a variety of sizes from tens to hundreds of nanometres. Because of their advantages including simple/economic production, well-defined structural features, unique shapes and sizes, genetic programmability and robust chemistries, recently viruses and virus-like nanoparticles (VLPs) have been used widely in biomedical applications and materials synthesis. In this critical review, we highlight recent advances in the use of virus coat proteins (VCPs) and viral nanoparticles (VNPs) as building blocks in self-assembly studies and materials development. We first discuss the self-assembly of VCPs into VLPs, which can efficiently incorporate a variety of different materials as cores inside the viral protein shells. Then, the self-assembly of VNPs at surfaces or interfaces is summarized. Finally, we discuss the co-assembly of VNPs with different functional materials (178 references).

Polymer Directed Protein Assemblies

“…Virus particles in general are attractive protein-based particles which show great promise in bionanotechnology, as they have been used as, e.g., delivery vessel, templates, nanowires, liquid crystals [69][70][71]. It is only natural that virus particles are combined with polymers, not only in a non-covalent fashion as described above but also covalently.…”

His-tagged norovirus-like particles: A versatile platform for cellular delivery and surface display

“…In the field of gene and immune therapy, VLP-based tools have been developed by modulating VLP packaging, display, and/or targeting (reviewed extensively, for example, in [3][4][5][6][7]). Furthermore, VLPs even show promise as new biological nanomaterials [8][9][10][11][12]. As a nanocarrier platform, VLPs offer the advantages of morphological uniformity, biocompatibility, the capacity to potentiate the immune response, and easy functionalization.…”

Plant virus directed fabrication of nanoscale materials and devices

“…PVNs have proven to be both genetically and chemically malleable to the addition of novel moieties that add new functionalities to the virus nano-structure (Flynn et al, 2003;Liu et al, 2012;Pokorski and Steinmetz, 2011;Saunders and Lomonossoff, 2013). Yet despite these characteristics the application of intact virus particles is often limited by problems associated with viral replication and recombination that lead to the deletion of the desired function.…”