For many years, I was fascinated by the assembly of peptides into supersecondary structures, for example, coiled‐coil dimers and collagen mimetic triple helices. Two graduate students in my group, David Przybyla and Marcos Pires, jolted me out of my reverie by pitching some ideas for higher‐order assembly of these motifs in the mid‐2000s. Our collaborative work produced peptide materials with a host of different morphologies, and I became entranced with the potential of peptides as biomaterial building blocks for regenerative medicine.

This issue of Peptide Science, focused on peptide materials and their applications, is a clear demonstration that this field is thriving. The peptide motifs for hierarchical assembly are continuing to expand as seen in the Review by Medina and co‐workers describing fluorous peptide building blocks (some of the amazing morphologies obtained are shown on the cover), my Review (Chmielewski and Curtis) in which we do a head‐to‐head comparison of metal‐promoted higher‐order assembly of coiled‐coil and collagen mimetic peptides, Yan and co‐workers' Review on the assembly of cyclic dipeptides and the Review by Lynn and co‐workers describing a path for using disordered peptide domains for precise spatiotemporal assembly. Additionally, articles presenting new findings in the issue describe cell‐compatible hydrogels formed from coiled‐coil peptides (Koksch and co‐workers), short self‐assembling peptides with urea bonds (Mihara and co‐workers) and tryptophan‐rich peptides (Xu and co‐workers). Other assembling motifs herein are dipeptide hydrazides (Ikeda and co‐workers), dipeptides (Mandal and co‐workers) and beta hairpin peptides (Wang et al.).

Peptides are usually easy to obtain synthetically, therefore there is a growing body of work focused on engineering peptide materials for specific applications. For instance, in their Reviews in this issue, Nilsson and co‐workers provide insights into chemical strategies for display signaling motifs on peptide materials, Montclare and co‐workers demonstrate the use of peptides‐based vehicles for gene delivery, and Thordarson and co‐workers discuss nanoparticles that can be functionalized with dual peptide components. The wide‐ranging nature of peptides is also highlighted in the primary research work describing their practical use. Applications as diverse as forming charge‐transfer complexes using a peptide nanotube scaffold (Uji and co‐workers) to modulation of base pairing with cyclic peptide‐oligonucleotide conjugates (Lim and co‐workers) are detailed within. In their work, Smith‐Carpenter and co‐workers focus on peptide nanofibers, demonstrating the tunable ability to display thiol groups on the surface of the nanofibers as a means to label supramolecular surfaces.

Overall, the area of peptide‐based materials is a rapidly growing area, and the Reviews and primary research articles contained herein well document this burgeoning field.

多年以来，我着迷于将肽组装成超二级结构，例如盘绕螺旋二聚体和模拟胶原的三重螺旋。我们小组中的两个研究生David Przybyla和Marcos Pires通过提出一些在2000年代中期对这些图案进行高阶组装的想法，使我从遐想中摆脱了。我们的合作工作产生了具有多种不同形态的肽材料，我被肽作为再生医学生物材料的基础材料的潜力所吸引。

本期《肽科学》专注于肽材料及其应用，这清楚地表明了该领域的蓬勃发展。麦迪纳（Medina）及其同事描述氟肽构建基块（封面上显示了一些令人惊奇的形态）的综述（我的综述（Chmielewski和Curtis））中，分层组装的肽基序正在继续扩大。对金属促进的卷曲螺旋和胶原模拟肽的高阶组装进行了正面对比，Yan和同事对环二肽组装的评论以及Lynn和同事对通路的描述使用无序的肽结构域进行精确的时空组装。此外，在该问题上发表新发现的文章还描述了由卷曲螺旋肽形成的细胞相容性水凝胶（Koksch和他的同事），具有尿素键的短的自组装肽（Mihara和同事）和富含色氨酸的肽（Xu和同事）。本文中的其他组装基序是二肽酰肼（池田和同事），二肽（Mandal和同事）和β发夹肽（Wang等）。

肽通常很容易通过合成方法获得，因此，针对特定用途的工程化肽材料的研究工作日渐增多。例如，尼尔斯森（Nilsson）和他的同事在本期《评论》中提供了关于在肽材料上显示信号基序的化学策略的见解，蒙特克莱（Montclare）和他的同事们演示了使用基于肽的媒介物进行基因递送的方法，而索达森（Thordarson）和他的同事则证明了这一点。工作人员讨论了可以用双肽组分功能化的纳米颗粒。在描述其实际用途的主要研究工作中，多肽的广泛性质也得到了强调。其中详细介绍了使用肽纳米管支架（Uji和同事）形成电荷转移复合物以调节环状配对肽-寡核苷酸缀合物（Lim和同事）碱基配对的各种应用。Smith-Carpenter及其同事在他们的工作中专注于肽纳米纤维，证明了在纳米纤维表面显示硫醇基团作为标记超分子表面的手段的可调能力。

总体而言，基于肽的材料领域是一个快速增长的领域，本文中的评论和主要研究文章很好地证明了这一新兴领域。