Biological Production of Spatially Organized Functional Materials

Abstract

Catastrophic breakage of a material might bring severe accidents in aerospace engineering, construction, and transportation field. Therefore, engineering material with high toughness values is very important for these special applications. Many biological materials in nature, such as nacre, silk, and wood, possess high toughness values because of their highly organized micro- and nanostructure. Inspired by these natural materials, many scientists tried to build tough materials by improving their orientation of the micro- and nanostructure. However, most of the current fabrication methods are either energy-consuming or labor-intensive, the mild and scalable production of engineering tough materials remains challenging.