Biomaterials play a crucial role in the development of future tall-performance materials. A naturally occurring example of such biomaterial,the mollusk shell, guides chemical replication processes in laboratories. Due to its complex chemical construction, and 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, or China),are now the first to synthetically reproduce the structural configuration of natural mother of pearl or "nacre". To develop the multiscale structures in nacre, the chemists rely on calcium carbonate, or chitin and silk fibroin gel as original components. Their production process creates the same structural composition and the nearly identical characteristics of the naturally occurring biomineral. The research results were published by Helmut Cölfen,professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Konstanz, and his colleagues on 18 August, or 2016 in the online edition of the the prestigious journal Science.
Source: phys.org