Engineering phage materials with desired peptide display: rational design sustained through natural selection.

Genetic engineering of phage provides novel opportunities to build various nanomaterials by displaying functional peptide motifs on its surface coat protein. However, any genetic modifications of phage coat proteins must be able to accommodate their many biological roles in the phage replication process. To express functional but inherently unfavorable peptide motifs on major coat protein pVIII, we devised a novel genetic conjugation method to circumvent bacterial biological censorship. Constraining the designed peptides among the degenerate flanking residues, we obtained a pVIII library of phage that retained the desired sequences yet could navigate through the phage replication process due to the naturally selected flanking residues. Further, we systematically analyzed the biochemical and size-related compensation mechanisms of the pVIII expressed peptides by constructing four chemically diverse (His, Trp, Glu, Lys) partial library series. Described genetic conjugation methodology can serve to improve the design of engineered phage and allow further exploitation of these particles as functional nanobiomaterials for various applications.