Peptides
are the workhorses of life, providing cellular and molecular communications,
carrying out enzymatic reactions, controling material formation, and performing transport and motor functions. The overarching vision of the Center has been to
combine the recent advances of molecular biology/genetics,
engineering/nano/molecular technologies and computation/information science to
create molecular biomimetics, a new paradigm in materials science and
engineering. In this unique approach, while the molecular machinery of biology
is used to carry out the molecular recognition and assembly, inorganics and
synthetics are utilized towards functional hybrid molecular- and
nano-structures in developing novel materials and systems, beyond what
materials science has been able to achieve until now.
