Box 2.

Addressing shortcomings of peptides in biomaterials. Problems of poor affinity could be addressed with covalent stabilization approaches such as “stapled” peptides (top). The short nature of synthetic peptides could be improved with chemoselective conjugation strategies such as native chemical ligation (middle top). Multiple functions can be combined, for example using self-assembling strategies (middle bottom), and materials with extreme multivalency can be produced, for example with dendrimers or self-assembly (bottom).