Bioinspired and Green Synthesis of Nanostructures

12Protein Cages and their Potential Application in Therapeutics

Chiging Tupe^1,2 and Soumyananda Chakraborti^1,2*

¹National Institute of Malaria Research, Dwarka Sector 8, New Delhi, India

²Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research (AcSIR), UP, India

Abstract

Nature uses self-assembly properties of protein to produce a large variety of complex and highly symmetric protein architectures with a broad range of biological activities. These complexes include filaments, protein lattices and symmetric cages. Within different supra-molecular protein architectures (complexes), protein cages are probably the most sophisticated protein-based architectures. Their self-assembly from a small number of subunits into symmetrical, mono-disperse architectures have inspired thousands of scientists from multidisciplinary fields. Cage architectures are abundant in nature starting from virus capsid to bacterial micro-compartment, such as carboxysome. In the last two decades, protein cages have been developed as extremely useful material for biotechnology and therapeutic applications, mostly because of their remarkable diversity in sizes, shapes and structures. Furthermore, their ease of production in large quantities using biological systems, and biocompatibility makes them a very attractive system for manipulation. Protein cages were also found useful for a variety of other applications, including different nanoparticle synthesis, catalysis, diagnostics and targeted drug delivery. For example, ...