Natural History Collections as Inspiration for Biomaterials and Technology

Dear Colleagues,

The efficiency and performance of contemporary materials for technology could be improved by incorporating life-like design specifications, systems, and behaviour. Several recent “living technologies” instilled life-like phenomena into synthetic materials and structures conferring unprecedented self-responsive and self-adaptive behaviors to the constant stream of changes in the external environment. As a result of sensing and responding to externalities, the performance of the material becomes lengthy, the levels of versatility are increased, and much more environmental robustness is achieved. By following this bioinspired approach, it is feasible to increase the degree of miniaturization and sophistication of materials.

Biomimetic and bioinspired science is used to design and engineer these living materials and structures for technology. However, the ability to translate unique engineering design principles from nature into technology is very challenging. Several obstacles include the difficulty in understanding what adaptations are meant for, and what is being made more efficient and effective and how trade-offs resolve themselves. These questions need to be answered for an effective, worthwhile translation each time it is undertaken. Recently, help has been brought to hand with biomimetic algorithms, databases, taxonomical, and biological text extraction by computer programs. The facts to support these biological information extraction processes ultimately comes from vast amounts of scientific descriptions, observations of life-forms in the field, and the lab.

One neglected source of biological information acquisition is natural history collections incorporating preserved specimens of every kind of organism, in whole or in part and DNA of organisms, as well as volumes of natural history literature. Those specimens are generally well organized and come with ecological information and details of the habitats they came from. Natural history museum collections represent a fraction of actual biodiversity, but they are representative of many key highly diverse ecosystems. Natural history collections are easily accessible and systematically ordered physical compilations of biodiversity and are a vital resource of materials innovation over millions of years of evolution.

At the world's 3 leading natural history museum collections, there are an estimated 80 million specimens at the Natural History Museum, London; 126 million at the Smithsonian; and 32 million in the American Museum of Natural History. Although these probably underestimate the true total, considering all the microfossils and micro-organisms that cannot all be counted. Moreover, there are lots of same species held in each museum. Within this large number, there are extant species and a large proportion of fossils. Therefore, the global database put together as a whole, and with the same species excluded, still comprises a massive number of purposeful material designs that may have use for technical analogs; a large fraction of which are yet to be discovered, because of the ad hoc nature of biomimetics.

A few researchers have published valuable examples of looking at functional adaptations among collections and translating them by design and fabrication into usable technology. A careful study of specimens in tandem with their ecological and environmental contexts provides a wealth of solutions to problems faced by organisms. Many of these problems face all sorts of technologies and so analogs can be developed for human technology.

This Special Issue of Materials explores the possibilities that increased scientific study of natural history museum collections systematically can bring to bioinspired technology transfer of all sorts of materials and structures. The issue aims to highlight good examples where the examination of collections has led to valuable biomimetic and bioinspired discoveries, design solutions to key technical problems, and fabrication of technological products with immediate or future potential in a broad spectrum of industries ranging from healthcare to aerospace.

Prof. Dr. David W. Green
Dr. Gregory Shaun Watson
Dr. Jolanta Anna Watson
Guest Editors

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• Bioinspired
• biomimetic
• biomaterials
• tissue
• implants
• structures
• technology
• healthcare