1. Peptide-Nanoparticle Strategies, Interactions, and Challenges

The ability to control and manipulate peptide-nanoparticle interactions is an important goal in achieving biofunctionalized materials with enhanced properties and precise nanostructures for use in sensing, catalysis, and biomedical applications. However, currently, there are many challenges to overcome in order to obtain better design and create these peptide-based functional nanomaterials. These include a need to better our understanding of the mechanisms/forces which drive peptide-nanomaterial interactions, improve characterization techniques to probe the peptide-nanoparticle interfaces, to design and identify new nanomaterial-binding peptides with greater affinities using a combination of advanced combinatorial techniques and next-gen sequencing, and to effectively utilize computational modeling to guide/predict peptide-nanomaterial binding. In this chapter, we describe these technical challenges and highlight recent examples of peptide-nanoparticle interactions, their resultant properties, and how some of these challenges are being addressed.