Membranes play a vital role in a variety of physiological processes. Recreating these processes outside of the cell will allow us to better understand them as well as design an entirely new class of materials that can sense, transport, or target important biological signals and molecules. In this talk, I will present our recent work harnessing lipid-protein interactions to design membrane-based nanoparticles for biosensing and therapeutic applications. Our approach, bridging synthetic biology techniques and model membrane assembly, provides an innovative yet simple method to probe the role of membrane composition and biophysical properties on protein dynamics and to advance the design of nanoparticles that leverage membrane protein activity.