Another reminder of just how much we still have to learn from nature:
In nature, helical macromolecules such as collagen, chitin and cellulose are critical to the morphogenesis and functionality of various hierarchically structured materials. During tissue formation, these chiral macromolecules are secreted and undergo self-templating assembly, a process whereby multiple kinetic factors influence the assembly of the incoming building blocks to produce non-equilibrium structures. A single macromolecule can form diverse functional structures when self-templated under different conditions. Collagen type I, for instance, forms transparent corneal tissues from orthogonally aligned nematic fibres, distinctively coloured skin tissues from cholesteric phase fibre bundles and mineralized tissues from hierarchically organized fibres. Nature’s self-templated materials surpass the functional and structural complexity achievable by current top-down and bottom-up fabrication methods.
Continued at http://www.robaid.com and http://www.nature.com