6. Concluding remarks
Integrated concepts from material science, biology, chemistry, and engineering have developed TMV, BSMV, and their VLPs for the synthesis of high-quality nanomaterials for diverse applications. TMV and BSMV are particularly attractive as biotemplates due to their ease of manipulation, large scale production in bacterial culture, and surface moieties that facilitate interactions with a number of materials. New insights afforded by structural biology and spectroscopic characterization now inform the engineering of CP molecular interactions within a viral particle/VLP, and between the viral particle/VLP and deposited nanomaterials. These have led to a number of innovative genetic strategies that enhance biotemplate structural stability and improve the uniformity and properties of synthesized nanoscale structures enabling diverse applications such as sensing, catalysis, and energy storage. While further engineering is needed to scale up these systems for widespread industrial nanomaterial synthesis, emerging technologies from synthetic biology and machine learning promise to accelerate the pace of TMV- and BSMV- derived biotemplate development in the years to come.