Protein-based custom-designed molecular nanotraps for biomedical applications

• Devid Maniglio,
• Alice Marinangeli and
• Alessandra Maria Bossi

Beilstein J. Nanotechnol. 2026, 17, 683–687, doi:10.3762/bjnano.17.47

• imprinted polymers; natural polymers silk fibroin; SilMA; Introduction Molecular recognition is a cornerstone in biomedical nanotechnology; it is pivotal to applications ranging from drug delivery to sequestering and to sensing. Where traditional affinity systems, such as antibodies, fall short for

• mechanical strength, stability, and controlled biodegradability [16]. Also, SF is often functionalized with pendant double bonds to enable cross-linking and is often referred to as SilMA [17]. SF and SilMA find a wide use as cell scaffolds for tissue engineering and biofabrication. To date, GelMA and SilMA

• proteins were initially functionalized to make them cross-linkable via radical polymerization by introducing side-chain double bonds [14][17]. Next, SilMA or GelMA were dissolved at high dilutions (from 0.01 to 3 mg·mL−1) and allowed to spontaneously assemble into entangled disordered nanometric