Patent ID: 8163521

Claim:
A method of constructing protein multimers, comprising: 1) providing a plurality of proteins comprising a heterologous short dimerization or multimerization promoting peptide or peptides, wherein said short dimerization or multimerization promoting peptide or peptides possess(es) a metal binding loop motif selected from the group consisting of CxCxxxxCxC (SEQ ID NO: 38), CxCxxxxxCxC (SEQ ID NO: 41) and CxCxxxxxxCxC (SEQ ID NO: 1) and hydrophobic amino acids that repeat before and/or after said metal binding loop motif about every 3 or 4 amino acids for at least two, three or four times; 2) providing a metal; and 3) mixing the plurality of proteins and the metal so that said proteins self-assemble to form at least one protein structure selected from the group consisting of homo-dimers, hetero-dimers and multimers.