A nanoscale cage, which the team call a SAGE. A number of potential practical applications have been identified, in areas such as medicine
Image by Richard Sessions, Thom Sharp and Jordan Fletcher

Last week the prestigious journal Science published a paper from a multidisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Bristol, led by Professor Dek Woolfson from Chemistry and Biochemistry and involving Dr Massimo Antognozzi and Professor Merv Miles from Physics.  The publication describes how small protein molecules, known as peptides, can be designed from scratch to deliver a toolkit for constructing more-complex structures and materials.  This is part of an emerging global effort to engineer biological systems more predictably and reliably, known as synthetic biology.

In the new work, the Bristol team has used parts from the toolkit to make larger hexagonal protein assemblies, which then piece themselves together to make protein sheets, resembling the pattern of hexagons in chicken wire.  The curious thing is that the protein sheets then fold over on themselves and close to form hollow spheres (see image).

These spheres are 100 nm across—that’s about one hundredth of the width of a human hair—they are just one sheet of molecules thick, and they have nanometer-sized openings on their surfaces.  The hexagonal surface structure was observed using advanced atomic force microscopy methods developed by Rob Harniman, Dr Massimo Antognozzi and Professor Merv Miles (Physics).

Find out more at University of Bristol News.