Rewriting Life
Mimicking the Building Prowess of Nature
Scientists build new materials using inspiration from complex biological forms.
“We try to identify biological systems that have unusual and sophisticated properties, such as optical, structural, or magnetic properties, to make extremely sophisticated, efficient, and highly potent devices and materials,” says Aizenberg, who is also a core faculty member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. “Then we take these principles and try to integrate them with what we already know in materials science–incorporating them into existing materials or fabricating a new generation of materials based on biological principles.” The work could result in better fiber optics, paint that changes color in response to temperature or light, and new ways of delivering drugs or clearing arterial plaques.
This collection of striking images explores some of Aizenberg’s new materials, as well as the organisms that inspired them.
Nanodreadlocks: “One specific feature that interests me more than anything else at the moment is how nature creates adaptive materials that optimize performance in response to changing environmental cues,” says Aizenberg. “The systems I am trying to replicate in my lab are the surfaces of sea urchins. They cover their bodies with an array of microflowers that constantly open and close, protecting the body from contamination.”
Taking inspiration from sea urchins, Aizenberg’s team has developed nanobristles that spontaneously curl into a precise array of helical bundles when immersed in an evaporating liquid. Aizenberg likens the phenomena to the way wet, curly hair clumps together and coils to form dreadlocks. The bristles shown here are made of an epoxy resin and are approximately 100 nanometers in diameter–about one-thousandth the width of a human hair.
The technology could be used to produce high-quality optical photonics devices or engineered tissues. Bone and teeth, for example, are a combination of inorganic and organic materials. “By learning how to grow ordered phases of inorganic material on top of organic material, one can produce synthetic tissues similar in structure and function to biological tissue,” says Aizenberg. The same approach might one day be used to get rid of unwanted inorganic materials in the body, such as kidney stones or the plaques that build up in the arteries and cause heart disease.
