Designed Complex Peptide-Based Adaptive Systems: A Bottom-Up Approach

Systems chemistry represents a shift from studying molecules in isolation to studying the collective behavior of mixtures or ensembles of reacting and interacting molecules. This research direction provides new ways to build and understand collective chemical properties and emergent functions that are inaccessible using conventional, reductionist, chemistry approaches. This field exemplifies fundamental connections between chemistry and biology, and has the potential to give rise to completely new ways for chemists to approach and resolve wide-ranging issues related to all aspects of living systems, that themselves are complex systems. Short peptides, while simple in design, carry rich and versatile information encoded in sequence specific side-chain interactions, that makes it possible to access a high level of complex, information rich systems with emergent properties from Life's simplified building blocks. This review focuses on recent developments in the synthesis of complex adaptive systems based on peptides, where multiple components are designed to cooperatively interact, react and collectively adapt to their context.