Borrowing from nature to produce highly structured biomimetic materials
Natural biological tissues are often hierarchically structured, and these structures appear to correlate strongly with tissue properties and functionalities. Finding out how a tissue self-assembles from cellular proteins has captured the interest of many biologists and material scientists who are interested in borrowing from natures bag of tricks to synthesize artificial materials with desired properties. A team of Berkeley Lab and University of California, Berkeley, scientists has recently discovered a method for controlling the assembly of such complex structures covering a large area from identical helical building blocks, in this case a rod-shaped virus, an accomplishment that could accelerate the development of diverse functional materials.