ABSTRACT
Nanostructures can be found almost everywhere in nature. A recent review article is therefore, entitled “Live as a Nanoscale Phenomenon” (Mann 2008). On one hand, the understanding of the underlying sophisticated biochemical and biophysical mechanisms is of central importance for fundamental biological research. On the other hand, this knowledge turns out to be extremely useful in materials science: Biomimetic* or bioinspired synthesis approaches appear to be very advantageous. In contrast to common synthesis methods, natural nanostructures are formed under favorable, gentle conditions, that is, at ambient temperature, near neutral pH, etc. Biomimetic approaches promise to be environment-friendly and energy-conserving. Furthermore, natural nanostructures are usually unmatched by synthetic materials with respect to their delicacy, precision, and regularity. In summary, the idea of biomimetic materials synthesis is the exploitation of principles observed in nature in order to solve synthesis problems, for example, in nanoscience. Biomineralization turns out to be a particularly important source of inspiration for nanomaterials synthesis. erefore, this chapter starts with a brief description of our present knowledge concerning the principles of biomineralization. In the light of these principles, a number of important developments in biomimetic nanomaterials synthesis are illustrated with selected
examples, such as the synthesis of silica-based as well as calciumbased nanostructures and hybrid materials. It should be noted that there is an increasingly huge number of publications in this rapidly growing eld. Due to the limited space and tutorial style of this handbook, a selection had to be made in order to highlight basic principles and major trends. For more comprehensive reviews, the interested reader is directed to recent monographs (Bar-Cohen 2005, Nalwa 2005, Ruiz-Hitzky et al. 2008) and review articles (see, e.g., Sarikaya et al. 2003, Zhang 2003, Vincent et al. 2006, Mann 2008, Weiner 2008).
