Manufacturing goes viral

(Nanowerk News) Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have turned a benign virus into an engineering tool for assembling structures that mimic collagen, one of the most important structural proteins in nature. The process they developed could eventually be used to manufacture materials with tunable optical, biomedical and mechanical properties.

The researchers, led by Seung-Wuk Lee, UC Berkeley associate professor of bioengineering and faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), describe their "self-templating material assembly" process in the Oct. 20 issue of the journal Nature ("Biomimetic self-templating supramolecular structures").

"We took our inspiration from nature," said Lee. "Nature has a unique ability to create functional materials from very basic building blocks. We found a way to mimic the formation of diverse, complex structures from helical macromolecules, such as collagen, chitin and cellulose, which are the primary building blocks for a wide array of functional materials in animals and plants." Video:http://www.youtube.com/watchv=f2h5SEUPKo&feature=player_embedded&noredirect=1 Fuente: http://www.nanowerk.com/news/newsid=23112.php