{"id":13165,"date":"2021-07-13T10:48:48","date_gmt":"2021-07-13T09:48:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.innovationnewsnetwork.com\/?p=13165"},"modified":"2024-06-26T17:03:34","modified_gmt":"2024-06-26T16:03:34","slug":"learning-from-biology-to-improve-water-splitting-catalysts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.innovationnewsnetwork.com\/learning-from-biology-to-improve-water-splitting-catalysts\/13165\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning from biology to improve water splitting catalysts"},"content":{"rendered":"
Biogenic minerals represent a highly adaptive class of materials including diverse structures ranging from vertebrate bone to snail shells and magnetite nanoparticles bio-synthesised in magnetotactic bacteria. Biomaterials characteristically combine lightweight structures with dedicated functional properties (mechanical, optical, magnetic) that are often unrivalled by man-made ceramics. This is particularly intriguing when considering that these materials are grown under mild conditions using a limited selection of available elements. Living organisms have developed elaborate mechanisms to construct sophisticated mineral architectures optimised at several hierarchical levels from the macroscopic down to the molecular scale.<\/p>\n
Nature\u2019s dexterity in using organic matrices and compartmentalisation to generate bio-inorganic hybrid materials with a high degree of structural organisation remains largely unmatched in synthetic systems. However, the translation of some key design concepts of biological mineralisation into synthetic materials holds enormous potential for the development of low-temperature routes towards self-assembled materials with a wide range of functional properties.<\/p>\n