ABSTRACT
Marine structures like any other natural living structures are made with immaculate resource and energy efciency using common, readily available materials through selfassembly into highly organized hierarchies. All functional structures optimized to their environment are produced in this way. This gives us the opportunity to produce structures with intricate shapes and architectures that are tailored to their functions. Biomimetic approaches using marine structures have yield promising outcomes for application in the tissue engineering of skeletal tissues (Weiner 1986, 2008). One such approach involves conjuring material environments at the molecular and macromolecular scales that try to
CONTENTS
30.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 575 30.2 Using Biomimicry for Tissue Engineering ..................................................................... 578
30.2.1 Musculoskeletal Tissues ....................................................................................... 578 30.2.2 Natural Templates .................................................................................................. 579 30.2.3 Coral as Bone Graft Material ................................................................................580
