1 of 8) 1603203 via either supercritical drying or freeze drying to prevent the collapse of the network structure by the surface tension of the liquid during drying process. To form a wet gel, a condensation mechanism (such as a cross-linking reaction) in the liquid is typically required, for example, sol-gel chemistry has been used to develop oxide-based aerogels such as SiO 2 -or TiO 2 aerogels, [13][14][15] aldol condensation has been used to develop resorcinol-formaldehyde polymer and carbon aerogels, [16][17][18] nanoparticle condensation by rapid cap removal has been used to develop semiconducting metal chalcogenide aerogels, [19,20] etc. The particular condensation reactions limit the types of materials that can be generated in the aerogel form. We have previously developed a methodology to physically assemble 1D nanowires or 2D nanosheets into an interconnected network from solution during their concentration increase (either by concentrating of suspension via solvent evaporation or by the continuous growth of nanowires out of a precursor solution). [21][22][23] This methodology requires no particular crosslinking reaction only relies on the van der Waals interaction, and works well when there is shape anisotropy (thus it will be termed shape anisotropy methodology, SAI in this work). It has been used to significantly widen the range of material types for aerogel structures: pristine carbon nanotube, MnO 2 , Ag, Cu, Si nanowire and pristine graphene, hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), and MoS 2 nanosheet aerogels without any cross-linking agents have been demonstrated for the first time providing excellent properties and interesting applications. [21] In this work, we investigated the SAI aerogel formation using biological molecules, M13 viruses. M13 virus is a filamentous bacteriophage which is ≈880 nm in length and ≈6.6 nm in diameter (with very low density of 0.91 g cm −3 calculated from molecular weight of 16.4 MDa [24] ). This nanowire shape makes it a very good candidate for the gel and aerogel formation using the SAI strategy. Using M13 virus freestanding extremely lightweight (<5 mg cm −3 ) 3D bulk structures can be obtained with excellent mechanical properties for the first time. Furthermore, as the M13 virus has been used as templates for versatile nanomaterial assembly, we have also investigated the SAI aerogel formation using inorganic-nanoparticle-complexed M13 virus. Ruthenium (Ru) and cobalt ferrite (CoFe 2 O 4 ) are used as two example materials in this work (one represent the example of mono-and the other represent multi-inorganic components),The filamentous M13 viruses are widely used as a bio-template to assemble many different functional structures. In this work, based on its shape anisotropy, reasonable aspect ratio (length to diameter of ≈130), and low density, freestanding, bulk 3D aerogels are assembled from M13 for the first time. These ultralight porous structures demonstrate excellent mechanical properties with elastic behavior up to 90% compression. Furthermore, as the genome of M1...