Tu(r)ning weakness to strength

Biological systems contain highly functional and mutable materials ranging from inferior building blocks with weak chemical bonding (e.g. H-bonds in spider silk), to abundantly available materials (e.g. silica in some sea creatures), to structurally inferior materials (e.g. extremely brittle crystals in mineralized tissues like nacre or bone). Although wide and varying, biology commonly exhibits unlikely harmony within material structures and physiologic functionality. How can we exploit our knowledge of biological systems in designing synthetic materials, and can we extrapolate from this, a broad yet fundamental similarity between protein materials to a subject as classical and ancient as music? (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.