An insightful article on diatoms, the ubiquitous single-celled, planktonic algae found in water around the world, raises some interesting questions for nanotechnology.
Diatoms, as it turns out, are a wonderful example of nature figuring out how to take its raw materials from the surrounding environment to make something useful, in this case the intricate three dimensional silica shells, or frustules, that encases them.
For anyone wondering how this elegant self assembly happens there is bad news, noone is quite sure, and may wont be for a long time to come. While nature does an elegant job when it comes to self assembly, and is often given as the rational for molecular nanotechnology, it has had a billion years of trial end error to get things right. By identifying the proteins responsible for these processes, and decoding the genome, we are still only scratching the surface of the problem. It may be that molecular nanotechnology offers a simplified route to build just what we need, a kind of nature lite, but as with unravelling the secrets of diatoms, its far too early to say.