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Huddy, Hsia, Kibler, Xu & 27 others in the Nobel Prize winning group of David Baker have designed standardized protein building blocks that self assemble into a wide range of nanostructures. The building blocks attach to each other at engineered sites and angles, and come in various sizes.

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H Matsunami, YH Yoon, VA Meshcheryakov, K Namba, FA Samatey. Scientific Reports 2016 doi: 10.1038/srep27399
A periplasmic flagellar chaperone protein, FlgA, is required for P-ring assembly in bacterial flagella of taxa such as Salmonella enterica or Escherichia coli. Here we present the open and closed crystal structures of FlgA from Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium, grown under different crystallization conditions. An intramolecular disulfide cross-linked form of FlgA caused a dominant negative effect on motility of the wild-type strain.

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The Capsid of a virus is its outer shell or "skin". Viruses have evolved intricate and elegant ways to assemble capsid protein chains into complete, usually spherical capsids, often with icosahedral symmetry. Pictured is an extremely simplified model of a capsid, where a single enlarged atom represents each of the 360 protein chains in the capsid of the Simian Virus 40 (SV40), a member of a group of cancer-causing viruses that has been extensively researched for decades.

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