In recent years, interest in manmade or artificial bionanostructures, including peptide-based supramolecular assemblies have been intense and are expected to escalate further. Proteins are perhaps one of the most diverse and complex structures in nature. When designed appropriately, self-assembling peptide nanostructures (SPNs) can mimic the functions of natural proteins. This research group intends to develop SPNs that can mimic or even have enhanced functional properties over biological proteins. Moreover, we expect that SPNs can be designed to have properties that are unprecedented in nature. Since the major driving forces that underlies the formation of supramolecular assembly are noncovalent interactions and thermodynamic/kinetic principles, an elaborate design of supramolecular building block is an initial but the most critical step in controlled SPN formation. In this talk, our recent research efforts about the design of novel peptide-based building blocks, towards the understanding of unusual in-cell self-assembly behavior of peptides, and on the development of unique supramolecular assemblies of peptides and peptide-DNA conjugates, will be presented.