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THE NUMBERS. “The 3000-fold fracture toughness of nacre was explained by energy dissipation by the polymeric layers.” https://lnkd.in/eNACsghr View in LinkedIn

GREATER THAN THE SUM. “The brittle crystals can add mechanical strength and hardness to the system while the soft polymeric or amorphous phase is deformable and adds elasticity.” https://lnkd.in/eNACsghr View in LinkedIn

GREATER STRENGTH BIOMINERALS. “Compared to a single crystal with cleavage planes, which makes it very brittle, the polycrystal-line mesocrystal structure with soft regions between the singe crystalline nanoparticle building units can make the hybrid material superiour to its constituents.” https://lnkd.in/eNACsghr View in LinkedIn

BIOMINERAL MESOCRYSTALS. “An important recent finding is that several Biominerals turned out to be mesocrystals like sea urchin spines, sponge spicules, foraminifera, nacre, calcite prisms in mussel shells,corals, or egg shells, as summarized by Oaki et al. and for calcareous sponge spicules.” https://lnkd.in/eNACsghr View in LinkedIn

SELF-ORGANIZATION. “Nonclassical crystallization has many facets, which so far may appear unrelated. However, the common underlying principle is controlled self organization. As this is a common principle in nature, we can further learn from natural organization schemes to take advantage of evolutionary optimization.” https://lnkd.in/eNACsghr View in LinkedIn

BIOLOGY IN CHEMISTRY. “Mesocrystal formation has a lot in common with known biological structuration processes and one can state that there is certainly a lot of "biology" involved in such nonclassical crystallization processes. This is also found in the related field of the so called biomorphs.” https://lnkd.in/eNACsghr View in LinkedIn

BIOMIMICRY. “In addition, the close similarity between the structural cascades from primary to quaternary structures can explain the "bio-Iike" appearance and morphologies of many crystals formed by a nonclassical crystallization pathway. The formation of biopolymer quaternary structures from several different molecules (e.g., the insulin tertiary structure is formed from chain A and B) implies that it should also be possible to form mesocrystals that consist of chemically different nanocrystals.” https://lnkd.in/eNACsghr View in LinkedIn

LEVELS OF STRUCTURE. “Finally, the interaction between several tertiary units of a biopolymer forms the quaternary structure, for instance the fibrils in the collagen example in Figure 15. The analogy in the nonclassical crystallization scenario is the mesocrystal. with an either self-determined morphology (this is the usual case) or a morphology determined by an external template, which is likely the case for some biominerals.” https://lnkd.in/eNACsghr View in LinkedIn

EXQUISITE REASONING. “The symmetry of a sharp edge is not obvious.” https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/JHEP07(2019)140.pdf View in LinkedIn

LEGO BLOCKS. “In analogy, a number of unit cells build the nanocrystal with potentially unusual shape and interaction pattern, which is the primary building unit in a nonclassical crystallization process.” https://lnkd.in/eNACsghr View in LinkedIn