ABSTRACT
Fabrication of advanced nanomaterials with multiple components, complex structure, and integrated functionality has become a trend in materials design for nanotechnology. The use of biological materials is advantageous over traditional top-down processing to produce these advanced nanomaterials in terms of exquisite spatial control at the nanometer scale and parallel self-assembly of multiple components, generating hierarchical structures to provide multifunctionality. These remarkable features have stimulated investigation into biomimetic approaches for the design of materials recently. Biomimetics is the emerging field of nanobiotechnology that adopts problem-solving methods inspired by nature’s functions and structures. Use of nature’s approach for control over small dimensions is based on building structures from the molecular level as nature does, “from the bottom up.”1
