PROTOCOL Production of tunable nanomaterials using hierarchically assembled bacteriophages Ju Hun Lee1–3,7, Christopher M Warner4,7, Hyo-Eon Jin1,2,5,7, Eftihia Barnes6, Aimee R Poda4, Edward J Perkins4 & Seung-Wuk Lee1–3 1Department of Bioengineering, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA. 2Division of Biological Systems and Engineering, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA. 3Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute, Berkeley, CA, USA. 4Environmental Laboratory, U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center, Vicksburg, MS, USA. 5College of Pharmacy, Ajou University, Suwon, Republic of Korea. 6Geotechnical and Structures Laboratory, U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center, Vicksburg, MS, USA. 7These authors contributed equally to this work. Correspondence should be addressed to S.-W.L. (
[email protected]). Published online 31 August 2017; doi:10.1038/nprot.2017.085 Large-scale fabrication of precisely defined nanostructures with tunable functions is critical to the exploitation of nanoscience and nanotechnology for production of electronic devices, energy generators, biosensors, and bionanomedicines. Although self- assembly processes have been developed to exploit biological molecules for functional materials, the resulting nanostructures and functions are still very limited, and scalable synthesis is far from being realized. Recently, we have established a bacteriophage- based biomimetic process, called ‘self-templating assembly’. We used bacteriophage as a nanofiber model system to exploit its liquid crystalline structure for the creation of diverse hierarchically organized structures. We have also demonstrated that genetic modification of functional peptides of bacteriophage results in structures that can be used as soft and hard tissue- All rights reserved. regenerating materials, biosensors, and energy-generating materials.