Here, we present two bifunctional protein building blocks that coassemble to form a bioelectrocatalytic hydrogel that catalyzes the reduction of dioxygen to water. One building block, a metallopolypeptide based on a previously designed triblock polypeptide, is electron-conducting. A second building block is a chimera of artificial ␣-helical leucine zipper and random coil domains fused to a polyphenol oxidase, small laccase (SLAC). The metallopolypeptide has a helix-random-helix secondary structure and forms a hydrogel via tetrameric coiled coils. The helical and random domains are identical to those fused to the polyphenol oxidase. Electron-conducting functionality is derived from the divalent attachment of an osmium bis-bipyrdine complex to histidine residues within the peptide. Attachment of the osmium moiety is demonstrated by mass spectroscopy (MS-MALDI-TOF) and cyclic voltammetry. The structure and function of the ␣-helical domains are confirmed by circular dichroism spectroscopy and by rheological measurements. The metallopolypeptide shows the ability to make electrical contact to a solid-state electrode and to the redox centers of modified SLAC. Neat samples of the modified SLAC form hydrogels, indicating that the fused ␣-helical domain functions as a physical cross-linker. The fusion does not disrupt dimer formation, a necessity for catalytic activity. Mixtures of the two building blocks coassemble to form a continuous supramolecular hydrogel that, when polarized, generates a catalytic current in the presence of oxygen. The specific application of the system is a biofuel cell cathode, but this protein-engineering approach to advanced functional hydrogel design is general and broadly applicable to biocatalytic, biosensing, and tissue-engineering applications.biocatalysis ͉ biofuel cell ͉ biomaterial ͉ laccase ͉ protein P rotein engineering provides the tool set to design and produce peptides and proteins that form the building blocks of new bio-inspired materials. The tool set allows for the manipulation of natural and artificial DNA sequences encoding the peptides or proteins of interest, and the subsequent biological production of the translated products. The methodology is powerful in that it allows for exact control over the identity and sequence of each residue and, consequently, the structural folding patterns of the resultant peptides or proteins (1). And, just as function stems from structure, it is also controlled within the protein-engineering scheme of materials design. There are a number of successful examples of hydrogels designed for tissueengineering and drug-delivery applications that use functional protein domains to obtain structural responsiveness to environmental cues (2-4). These examples include responsiveness to pH (5), temperature (6), shear stress (7), and ligand binding (8, 9) among others (refs. 2 and 10; ref. 3 and references therein). A wider range of applications, such as bioelectrocatalysis and biosensing, will benefit from the advantages of protein-based materials design pr...