A Perspective on Bio‐Mediated Material Structuring

Abstract

Bioinspiration, biomorphy, biomimicry, biomimetics, bionics, and biotemplating are terms used to describe the fabrication of materials or, more generally, systems to solve technological problems by abstracting, emulating, using, or transferring structures from biological paradigms. Herein, a brief overview of how the different terminologies are being typically applied is provided. It is proposed that there is a rich field of research that can be expanded by utilizing various novel approaches for the guidance of living organisms for "bio-mediated" material structuring purposes. As examples of contact-based or contact-free guidance, such as substrate patterning, the application of light, magnetic fields, or chemical gradients, potentially interesting methods of creating hierarchically structured monolithic engineering materials, using live patterned biomass, biofilms, or extracellular substances as scaffolds, are presented. The potential advantages of such materials are discussed, and examples of live self-patterning of materials are given.

Bio-Templating: An Emerging Synthetic Technique for Catalysts. A Review

“…In the past two decades, the field of biotemplating has emerged as a new way of engineering those new inorganic functional materials inspired by nature [4]. The foundation of the biotemplating technique is based on the incorporation of the desired inorganic compounds on the natural template followed by mineralization processes that occur naturally, where organic compounds of the templates disappear through degradation [5]. This entails the transfer of biological structures into inorganic materials through natural mineralization (fossilization) or artificial processes, allowing for the development of extremely intricate structures that replicate the different scales of hierarchy of natural materials used as templates.…”

“…Butterfly wings are of great interest as they present an intricate and complex microstructure and photonic resonances that control their structural color and make them very suitable for catalysis and electrochemical applications [23][24][25]. As the nanometer scale of natural templates has been replicated, the wide variety of prepared materials have many potential applications [5,26]. These applications (catalysis, sensors, cancer therapy, tissue engineering, energy capture and storage, adsorbents, etc.)…”

Biotemplating of a Highly Porous Cellulose–Silica Composite from Apium graveolens by a Low-Toxicity Sol–Gel Technique

“…17 These plants are used because of the toughness of the lignin, which can withstand template preparation without the erosion of their microstructure. 6,20 These techniques have utilized a sol-gel process with an alkoxide precursor such as tetramethyl orthosilicate in which a plant structure was partially eroded in the preparation phase (e.g., using cyclohexane in a Soxhlet evaporator). The material was subsequently infiltrated with a liquid precursor solution, and the solution gelled when reacted with a catalyst.…”

Modeling the Compressive Behavior of Anisotropic, Nanometer‐Scale Structured Silica

“…However, hierarchical materials can also be obtained through the replication of structured biological substances, in a process termed biotemplating . In fact, templating biological substances with silica has a long history in structural analysis, or to further our understanding of geological petrification processes .…”