In nature, specific biomolecules interacting with mineral precurors are responsible for the precise production of nanostructured inorganic materials that exhibit complex morphologies and superior performance. Despite advances in developing biomimetic approaches, the design rules for creating sequence-defined molecules that lead to the synthesis of inorganic nanomaterials with predictable complex morphologies are unknown. To address this challenge, this patent application highlights a new peptoid-based biomimetic approach for controlled synthesis of hierarchically-structured metallic nanomaterials. Though the detailed investigation of some peptoid-controlled gold nanomaterial formation processes by engineering peptoid sequences and investigating the resulting particle formation mechanisms, we develop a rule of thumb for designing peptoids that predictively enabled the morphological evolution from spherical to coral-shaped nanoparticles. These individual coral-shaped gold nanoparticles exhibit a plasmonic enhancement as high as 105 fold. This research presented in this patent application significantly advances our ultimate vision of predictive bio-inspired materials synthesis using sequence-defined synthetic molecules that mimic proteins and peptides.