The designed self-assembling peptides in the literature of 2011, 2012 and partly 2013 are reviewed in this Chapter. This Chapter focuses on the current development in the design and the nanomaterial application of self-assembling peptides. As for the recent applications of self-assembling peptides as biomaterials for cell/tissue engineering and a drug delivery, refer to the Chapter of “Self-assembling peptide materials” in Amino Acids, Peptides and Proteins: Volume 37.¹  All Scientific Papers published from 2011 to 2013 cited in this Chapter have been sourced mainly from the SciFinder databases on the internet and from scanning a selection of major journals.

The phenomenon that molecules spontaneously assemble into special structures in nano- and micrometer orders with precise recognition each other is called self-assembly or self-organization. In recent years, molecular design to control self-assembly has attracted much attention for a bottom-up technology to fabricate various nanostructures.^2,3  In particular, biomolecules such as DNA,^4–6  proteins and peptides^7–9  are useful molecular tools as components to produce self-assembling molecules and to fabricate structured materials in aqueous media. Hydrophobic interaction, electrostatic interaction, hydrogen bonds and Van del Waals interaction are major driving forces in self-assembly and cooperatively work to construct well-ordered supramolecular architectures.