The structure-based design of molecules that can bind efficiently to specific biological targets has been facilitated by the revolution in structural biology, which has provided increasingly quantitative information about the binding events between ligands and receptors. Protein engineering methods offer a useful strategy for producing macromolecules via this approach to design. Biosynthetic methods have been increasingly used as a strategy for producing well-controlled protein polymers with interesting crystalline, surface, assembly, mechanical, and biological properties. The versatility of biosynthetic methods has also been expanded by the demonstrated multi-site incorporation of a variety of non-natural amino acids with olefinic, aromatic halide, acetylenic, and azido-functionalized side chains . Synthetic approaches that take advantage of the sequence control of protein engineering methods are therefore rich with opportunities for making new molecules applicable to studying structure-function relationships with unparalleled precision and may be uniquely useful for the synthesis of protein polymers with tailored multivalent displays of saccharides, as well as displays of peptides and other moieties important for materials applications.
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