Self-assembly of biomolecules facilitates the creation of a diverse range of hierarchical nanostructures from a wide range of polymeric and non-polymeric materials. Peptides and specifically short peptides are very attractive in this respect due to their unmatched biocompatibility, ease of synthesis, functionability as well as tunable bioactivity along with the availability of rich chemistry for fine-tuning the structure and function of peptides according to environmental conditions. Self-assembled peptide based nanostructures such as tubes, filaments, fibrils, hydrogels, vesicles, and monolayers have been studied by many research groups and found application as three-dimensional cell growing scaffolds, dental implants, neural tissue engineering scaffolds and as carriers for drugs, proteins and genes, and nucleotides. Nanostructures are also being developed from designed or modified amino acids to have enhanced cellular as well as in vivo stability. These modified nanostructures showed enhanced drug delivery properties both under in vivo and in vitro conditions.

Short peptides have attracted much attention due to their easy synthesis, diverse functionalisation possibilities, low cost, possibility to make a large range of hierarchical nanostructures and most importantly their high biocompatibility and biodegradability.

Summary Malaria remains a public health problem of enormous magnitude, affecting over 500 million people every year. Lack of success in the past in the development of new drug/vaccines has mainly been attributed to poor understanding of the functions of different parasite proteins. Recently, RNA interference (RNAi) has emerged as a simple and incisive technique to study gene functions in a variety of organisms. In this study, we report the results of RNAi by double-stranded RNA of cysteine protease genes (falcipain-1 and -2) in the malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum. Using RNAi directed towards falcipain genes, we demonstrate that blocking the expression of these genes results in severe morphological abnormalities in parasites, inhibition of parasite growth in vitro and substantial ­accumulation of haemoglobin in the parasite. The inhibitory effects produced by falcipain double-stranded (ds)RNAs are reminiscent of the effects observed upon administering E-64, a cysteine protease inhibitor. The parasites treated with falcipain's dsRNAs also show marked reduction in the levels of corresponding endogenous falcipain mRNAs. We also demonstrate that dsRNAs of falcipains are ­broken into short interference RNAs ≈ 25 nucleotides in size, a characteristic of RNAi, which in turn activates sequence-specific nuclease activity in the malaria parasites. These results thus provide more evidence for the existence of RNAi in P. falciparum and also suggest possibilities for using RNAi as an effective tool to determine the functions of the genes identified from the P. falciparum genome sequencing project.

Nanostructures including hydrogels based on peptides containing non protein amino acids are being considered as platform for drug delivery because of their inherent biocompatibility and additional proteolytic stability. Here we describe instantaneous self-assembly of a conformationally restricted dipeptide, LeuΔPhe, containing an α,β-dehydrophenylalanine residue into a highly stable and mechanically strong hydrogel, under mild physiological aqueous conditions. The gel successfully entrapped several hydrophobic and hydrophilic drug molecules and released them in a controlled manner. LeuΔPhe was highly biocompatible and easily injectable. Administration of an antineoplastic drug entrapped in the gel in tumor bearing mice significantly controlled growth of tumors. These characteristics make LeuΔPhe an attractive candidate for further development as a delivery platform for various biomedical applications.