Protein-based materials engineering

The Comprehensive Capacity to Control Association of Oil-like Domains Provides the Necessary Understanding for Meaningful Engineering of Protein-based Materials for Diverse Medical and Nonmedical Applications... 

From the latter comes the fated promise to replace the finite petroleum reserves and to prepare products in an environmentally Mendly manner to sustain an increasingly complex society. It is now possible, by genetic engineering, to produce proteins that evolution has never called upon nature to prepare and to produce protein-based materials for addressing primary problems required for sustaining our society. 

The initial preparation of protein-based polymers utilized solution and solid phase peptide chemistry. This made possible the preparation of more than 1,000 polymer compositions. As discussed in Chapter 5, these compositions were studied for determination of their basic properties, for the development of the set of phenomenological axioms for protein engineering and function, and for the demonstration of the basic mechanism that underlies function. In short, it is the chemical synthesis that has allowed development of much of the basic science and the demonstration of the potential of protein-based materials in a timely manner. Mostly because of the historical relevance, but also because of the unique contributions of chemical synthesis to arriving at satisfactory purification of microbially prepared protein-based polymers, a brief description of the chemical synthesis of protein-based polymers is given below. 

As stated in Chapter 9, The consilient approach to tissue engineering utilizes biology s own materials and mechanisms, concerned with tissue structure and function, to achieve tissue restoration. The key materials elements are three the capacity of the elastic protein-based material to match the elastic modulus of the tissue to be restored, a remarkable biocompatibility of the pure elastic protein-based material, and the facility to design into the protein-based polymer sequence any desired biologically active sequence, which, by virtue of the innocuousness of the elastic protein-based material, allows proper expression of the incorporated biologically active sequence. This provides the opportunity for the proper functional relationship of protein-based material to the cells and the extracellular matrix of the tissue to be restored. 

Table 1.2 Some pharmaceuticals that were traditionally obtained by direct extraction from biological source material. Many of the protein-based pharmaceuticals mentioned are now also produced by genetic engineering...

Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Biological Process Technology Institute, University of Minnesota, St. Paul Elastic, plastic, and hydrogel-forming protein-based pol)nners... 

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