
Borrowing from Nature to Produce Highly Structured Biomimetic Materials Print

Doing Nature One Better

Biological tissues such as those that make up our organs are amazing feats of structural engineering. Even more fantastic, the tissues assemble themselves from building blocks based on the proteins that cells synthesize without any outside direction. And, if this isn't mind-boggling enough, consider how all this takes place over large distances with both precision and accuracy. Chemists and materials scientists would dearly like to lift a few pages out of nature's instruction manual and use their wisdom to construct complex structures that do human bidding. Unfortunately, that book is not yet for sale, so the would-be engineers have to find other ways to mimic nature as best they can.

Chung et al. have taken a big step in this direction. They noticed that animal tissues constructed from collagen, an important structural protein, have very different functions depending on the orientations of the collagen building blocks. They used a bacterial virus (a bacteriophage or just phage) as their building block, in part because its long, "chopstick-like" shape with a helical groove on its surface closely resembles collagen fibers. Dipping a glass substrate into a solution containing the virus and withdrawing it in just the right way, they were able to produce various structures. The process they developed could eventually be used to manufacture materials with tunable optical, biomedical, and mechanical properties.












Research conducted by: W.-J. Chung, J.-W. Oh, K. Kwak, B.Y. Lee, E. Wang, and S.-W. Lee (University of California, Berkeley, and Berkeley Lab); J. Meyer (Berkeley Lab); and A. Hexemer (ALS).

Funding: The U.S. National Science Foundation; the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research; the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency; the University of California, Berkeley; the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and the Korea Research Foundation. Operation of the ALS is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences.


ALS Science Highlight #251


ALSNews Vol. 332