Programming protein self assembly with coiled coils

The controlled assembly of protein domains into supramolecular structures will be an important prerequisite for the use of functional proteins in future nanotechnology applications. Coiled coils are multimerization motifs whose dimerization properties can be programmed by amino acid sequence. Here, we report programmed supramolecular self-assembly of protein molecules using coiled coils and directly demonstrate its potential on the single molecule level by AFM force spectroscopy. We flanked two different model proteins, Ig27 from human cardiac titin and green fluorescent protein (GFP), by coiled coil binding partners and studied the capability of these elementary building blocks to self-assemble into linear chains. Simple sterical constraints are shown to control the assembly process, providing evidence that many proteins can be assembled with this method. An application for this technique is the design of polyproteins for single molecule force spectroscopy with an integrated force-calibration standard.