Self-assembling peptides have emerged as new functional nanobiomaterials and received considerable attention in the areas of nanochemistry and biomedical engineering. [1] In this category are ionic-complementary peptides, which contain a repeating charge distribution and alternating hydrophobic and hydrophilic residues in the amino acid sequence; this leads to an unusual combination of amphiphilicity and chemical complementarity. Such peptides can self-assemble into stable nanostructures through electrostatic interactions, hydrogen bonds, and hydrophobic interactions.[1a, 2] Their nanostructures have a large number of potential applications, such as templates for nanofabrication, [3] scaffoldings for tissue repair and engineering, [4] nanocarriers for drug and gene/ small interfering RNA delivery, [5] and surface modifiers for enzyme immobilization in biosensors. [6] Many of these processes involve interface and surface patterning with peptide micro-/nanostructures. Therefore, it is critical to understand and control the peptide assembly on a surface for the development of these applications. Several studies have shown that the surface can facilitate and/or direct the assembly of peptides into patterned nanostructures. [7] Such patterns are usually generated according to the natural propensity of the peptides and the surface crystallography. Although the solution conditions can help to control the overall density of the peptide nanostructure over an entire surface, [7a] it would be very useful to develop techniques that produce patterns over local regions of a surface for the fabrication of nanoscale devices.To precisely control the peptide assembly and pattern the assembled nanostructures at desired locations on a surface, we adopt a mechanochemical approach by using atomic force microscopy (AFM). Mechanical force/stress has recently been applied to induce chemical reactions at the atomic level [8] and to deliver single molecules to specific locations. [9] Moreover, the indentation of an AFM tip can actually break a self-assembled protein nanotube. [10] Using such an approach, through the application of a relatively gentle mechanical force from a tapping AFM tip, we expect that peptide-assembled nanostructures can be broken into fragments, which in turn can serve as nuclei for further assembly through a nucleation and growth mechanism. In addition, the mechanochemical control over the nucleation process may aid the understanding of protein aggregation and amyloid-fiber formation. The use of tapping-mode AFM for such a purpose has several advantages. First, it provides the high quality of AFM imaging for biological samples. Second, the application of mechanical force and the AFM imaging can be achieved simultaneously, whereas the two are often operated separately in contactmode AFM.[11] The applied force by tapping mode is small enough for imaging, but large enough to disrupt the noncovalent interactions that hold the peptide assemblies. To our knowledge, this is the first study where a mechanochemical approach...