1.3 Building on the Building Blocks of Life

summary

Biology has designed an immense number of nanostructures from just twenty simple building blocks, the amino acids.
Biology does not explicitly direct how amino acids will assemble into structures. Rather, the properties of the amino acids dictate how they will spontaneously self-assemble. This dynamic organization is how proteins are constructed and is the key to achieving molecular function.
One important property of amino acids is the arrangement of their hydrophilic and hydrophobic surfaces. These surfaces dictate how the amino acids will self-assemble in solution.
In particular, two important predictors of self-assembly are \(\log(P)\) and the extent to which the solvent-accessible surface can be minimized.
We can predict self-assembly using computational techniques that simulate the small-scale interactions between amino acids.
We also can streamline the discovery of materials with new properties using this approach.