Center for Sustainable Materials (SusMat), School of Materials Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore637553.
School of Biological Sciences, NTU, Singapore637551.
Chem Rev. 2023 Mar 8;123(5):2049-2111. doi: 10.1021/acs.chemrev.2c00621. Epub 2023 Jan 24.
Polymeric materials produced from fossil fuels have been intimately linked to the development of industrial activities in the 20th century and, consequently, to the transformation of our way of living. While this has brought many benefits, the fabrication and disposal of these materials is bringing enormous sustainable challenges. Thus, materials that are produced in a more sustainable fashion and whose degradation products are harmless to the environment are urgently needed. Natural biopolymers─which can compete with and sometimes surpass the performance of synthetic polymers─provide a great source of inspiration. They are made of natural chemicals, under benign environmental conditions, and their degradation products are harmless. Before these materials can be synthetically replicated, it is essential to elucidate their chemical design and biofabrication. For protein-based materials, this means obtaining the complete sequences of the proteinaceous building blocks, a task that historically took decades of research. Thus, we start this review with a historical perspective on early efforts to obtain the primary sequences of load-bearing proteins, followed by the latest developments in sequencing and proteomic technologies that have greatly accelerated sequencing of extracellular proteins. Next, four main classes of protein materials are presented, namely fibrous materials, bioelastomers exhibiting high reversible deformability, hard bulk materials, and biological adhesives. In each class, we focus on the design at the primary and secondary structure levels and discuss their interplays with the mechanical response. We finally discuss earlier and the latest research to artificially produce protein-based materials using biotechnology and synthetic biology, including current developments by start-up companies to scale-up the production of proteinaceous materials in an economically viable manner.
由化石燃料制成的聚合物材料与 20 世纪工业活动的发展密切相关，因此也改变了我们的生活方式。虽然这带来了许多好处，但这些材料的制造和处理带来了巨大的可持续发展挑战。因此，迫切需要以更可持续的方式生产、其降解产物对环境无害的材料。天然生物聚合物——在某些性能上可以与合成聚合物相媲美甚至超越——为我们提供了巨大的灵感来源。它们由天然化学品在良性环境条件下制成，其降解产物是无害的。在这些材料可以被合成复制之前，阐明其化学设计和生物制造过程是至关重要的。对于基于蛋白质的材料，这意味着获得蛋白质结构单元的完整序列，这在历史上需要几十年的研究。因此，我们从获得承重蛋白质一级序列的早期努力的历史角度开始综述，然后介绍大大加速细胞外蛋白质测序的最新测序和蛋白质组学技术的发展。接下来，我们介绍了四大类蛋白质材料，即纤维材料、具有高可逆变形性的生物弹性体、硬质块状材料和生物胶粘剂。在每一类中，我们重点讨论一级和二级结构设计，并讨论它们与机械响应的相互作用。我们最后讨论了使用生物技术和合成生物学人工生产蛋白质材料的早期和最新研究，包括初创公司以经济可行的方式扩大蛋白质材料生产的当前进展。
