Engineering Mechanosensitive Multivalent Receptor–Ligand Interactions: Why the Nanolinker Regions of Bacterial Adhesins Matter

Inspired by bacterial adhesins, we present a promising
strategy
of how to engineer peptides to probe various mechanical strains of
extracellular matrix fibers. Functional sequence alignment of bacterial
adhesins reveals that the bacterial linkers connecting the multivalent
binding motifs recognizing fibronectin show considerable heterogeneity
in length. Their length regulates the tunable affinities for fibronectin
fibrils when stretched into different mechanical strain states. This
platform has potential applications in probing extracellular matrix
fiber strains in tissues.