Proteins and peptides are attractive green building blocks for the next generation of functional materials, offering great chemical diversity to encode biochemical signals. They can be biologically produced and engineered, processed in aqueous media,
and are inherently biodegradable resulting in low environmental impact. These materials and building blocks can be functional in their own right, but they can also interact with each other, and with other biomolecules, or catalyze biochemical cascades,
so as to exploit their hierarchical self-organization into dynamic systems. Revolutionary approaches are sprouting at the interface between supramolecular chemistry and biotechnology, to address key needs of our society, spanning from green catalysis,
sustainable materials production to tissue engineering and organoids, to new paradigms to treat cancer, neurodegeneration and infections. This symposium will foster scientific discussions on the latest progress on the design and mechanisms that enable
the hierarchical assembly of peptides, proteins, and their derivatives, to address diverse societal needs. Emphasis will be given to smart systems that respond to external stimuli (e.g. electric, magnetic, light, and shear) and/or physicochemical
variations within the local environment (e.g. temperature, pH, oxidative stress, metabolites). Dynamic systems can be envisaged with spatial-, temporal- and dosage-controlled functionalities for diverse applications in chemical engineering
(e.g. catalysis and separation), biomedicine (e.g. tissue engineering, drug delivery, biosensing), bioelectronics, energy harvesting, and high-performance structural materials. Advances in synthetic chemistry and biology, biotechnology
and biochemical engineering, open the door to large-scale use and commodity smart materials, to replace polymers/catalysts of limited sustainability.