Accurate design of megadalton-scale two-component icosahedral protein complexes

Abstract

Designed to assemble Symmetric macromolecular structures that form cages, such as viral capsids, have inspired protein engineering. Bale et al. used pairwise combinations of dimeric, trimeric, or pentameric building blocks to design two-component, 120-subunit protein complexes with three distinct icosahedral architectures. The capsid-like nanostructures are large enough to hold nucleic acids or other proteins, and because they have two components, the assembly of cargoes such as drugs and vaccines can be done in a controlled way. Science , this issue p. 389