Mechanically
Encoded Cellular Shapes for Synthesis
of Anisotropic Mesoporous Particles
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Abstract
The
asymmetry that pervades molecular mechanisms of living systems
increasingly informs the aims of synthetic chemistry, particularly
in the development of catalysts, particles, nanomaterials, and their
assemblies. For particle synthesis, overcoming viscous forces to produce
complex, nonspherical shapes is particularly challenging; a problem
that is continuously solved in nature when observing dynamic biological
entities such as cells. Here we bridge these dynamics to synthetic
chemistry and show that the intrinsic asymmetric shapes of erythrocytes
can be directed, captured, and translated into composites and inorganic
particles using a process of nanoscale silica-bioreplication. We show
that crucial aspects in particle design such as particle–particle
interactions, pore size, and macromolecular accessibility can be tuned
using cellular responses. The durability of resultant particles provides
opportunities for shape-preserving transformations into metallic,
semiconductive, and ferromagnetic particles and assemblies. The ability
to use cellular responses as “structure directing agents”
offers an unprecedented toolset to design colloidal-scale materials