Engineering living 'scaffolds' for building materials

When the inside of a mollusk shell shimmers in sunlight, the iridescence isn't produced by colored pigments but by tiny physical structures self-assembled from living cells and inorganic components. Now, a team of researchers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has developed a platform to mimic this self-assembly ability by engineering living cells to act as a starting point for building composite materials.