Stigmergy, a form of self-organization, was employed here to engineer a self-organizing peptide capable of forming a nano- or micro-structure and that can potentially be used in various drug delivery and biomedical applications. These self-assembling peptides exhibit several desirable qualities for drug delivery, tissue engineering, cosmetics, antibiotics, food science, and biomedical surface engineering. In this study, peptide biomaterial synthesis was carried out using an environment-reliant auto-programmer stigmergic approach. A model protein, α-gliadin (31, 36, and 38 kD), was forced to attain a primary structure with free –SH groups and broken down enzymatically into smaller fragments using chymotrypsin. This breakdown was carried out at different environment conditions (37 and 50 °C), and the fragments were allowed to self-organize at these temperatures. The new peptides so formed diverged according to the environmental conditions. Interestingly, two peptides (with molecular weights of 13.8 and 11.8 kD) were isolated when the reaction temperature was maintained at 50 °C, while four peptides with molecular weights of 54, 51, 13.8, and 12.8 kD were obtained when the reaction was conducted at 37 °C. Thus, at a higher temperature (50 °C), the peptides formed, compared to the original protein, had lower molecular weights, whereas, at a lower temperature (37 °C), two peptides had higher molecular weights and two had lower molecular weights.
Keywords: effect of temperature on protein digestion; peptide biomaterial synthesis; self-organizing peptides; stigmergy.