Natural mother of pearl structure, synthetic replication

Biomaterials play a crucial role in the development of future high-performance materials. A naturally occurring example of such biomaterial, the mollusk shell, guides chemical replication processes in laboratories. Due to its complex chemical construction, however, these processes are not easy to replicate synthetically. Chemists at the University of Konstanz, in cooperation with the University of Science and Technology of China (Hefei, China), are now the first to synthetically reproduce the st...