Living organisms produce a wide variety of complex, nano-, micro-, and macroscale structured functional materials in an energy-efficient and highly reproducible manner, all under rather mild aqueous synthetic conditions. Throughout these processes, specialized biomacromolecules, such as proteins and peptides, enable 1) the hierarchical organization to assemble biomaterials and execute high-level functions; and 2) the precise control over crystal nucleation, growth kinetics, phase transformation, and self-assembly, ultimately giving rise to biominerals with versatile functions. Inspired by nature, numerous approaches have been developed for the design and synthesis of bioinspired materials by using engineered proteins, peptides, DNAs, and other sequence-defined synthetic polymers (e.g. peptoids). These efforts address one of the grand challenges of materials science—to design and synthesize functional materials that rival those found in biology.

This symposium will highlight recent developments in the areas of 1) bioinspired macromolecular self-assembly to exploit (bio)macromolecules as building blocks to create hierarchical materials, and 2) biomimetic control over crystallization including a) bioinspired control over inorganic (nano)crystal nucleation and growth, and b) nanoparticle self-assembly and attachment. This symposium will also address 3) the most recent insights obtained in the principles underlying (bio) macromolecular self-assembly and bio-controlled crystal formation (including using in situ molecular imaging and computational tools).

biomimetic biomimetic (assembly) crystal growth hybrid in situ modeling nucleation & growth self-assembly transmission electron microscopy (TEM)