Recent Developments and Advances in Peptide Engineering

Call for Papers

Peptides represent a highly versatile class of molecules for designing novel materials and engineering new functionalities. The diverse role of peptides in natural and physiological processes such as membrane assembly, selective binding, receptor signaling, target recognition, cell-cycle regulation, and immunity has inspired their use in a broad range of applications including therapeutics, targeting agents, affinity ligands, subunit vaccines, drug delivery vectors, biosensors, and multifunctional biomaterials. The first generation of peptide design was based on mimicking and conserving structural and compositional themes available in nature. Although such schemes have shown reasonable successes, they are inherently limited to the natural or canonical space of amino acid building blocks. The second generation of peptide design, aimed at expanding the chemical, physical, and biological diversity, introduced synthetic motifs through nonnatural or noncanonical amino acids. Most recent work in the field of peptide engineering has aimed at further expanding the functional repertoire of peptides by creating synthetic constructs of peptides with nucleotides, sugars, and natural and synthetic polymers to generate hybrid peptide constructs also called peptidomimetics.

This special issue invites contributions from investigators in academia and industry showcasing the many exciting opportunities and developments in the field of peptide design and engineering. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Peptides as drugs and drug carriers
• Peptides for designing multifunctional biomaterials
• High-throughput peptide synthesis and combinatorial library screening
• Peptidomimetics and other peptide hybrid constructs
• Future directions in peptide design and engineering

Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal's Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jph/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/submit/journals/jph/rdape/ according to the following timetable:

Lead Guest Editor

• Pankaj Karande, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA

Guest Editors

• Millicent Sullivan, Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA
• Jennifer Cochran, Department of Bioengineering, Stanford University, Standford, CA, USA
• Scott Banta, Department of Chemical Engineering, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA