Building like a Coral—Parallelized, Multiscale Biofabrication
Asma Rehman, Marta Peña Fernández, Kristina K. Beck, Gavin L. Foster, Sebastian J. Hennige, Uwe Wolfram
TL;DR
This paper explores how corals create strong, sustainable materials under limited resources, offering insights for developing new biofabrication technologies.
Contribution
The paper reframes coral growth as a multiscale, parallelized biofabrication process, providing a blueprint for sustainable material development.
Findings
Coral skeletal materials are stiff, strong, and circular, even under resource-limited conditions.
Coral biomineralization processes suggest pathways for energy-efficient and self-organizing manufacturing.
The study outlines how coral-inspired methods could influence structural materials and regenerative engineering.
Abstract
Visible from space or residing in the depths of the ocean, scleractinian corals engineer vast ecosystems supporting high biodiversity and providing essential ecosystem services. By creating these ecosystems, corals address significant challenges in material science, generating skeletal materials that are stiff, strong, and inherently circular—even in conditions where energy and building resources can be scarce or energetically expensive to synthesize. Understanding coral skeletal materials has progressed due to their exceptional mechanical properties, potential biocompatibility, and, in case of cold‐water corals, their ability to be synthesized in darkness, at low temperature, and with limited energy resources. These natural, sustainable processes offer inspiring blueprints for the development of transformative new materials, which may drive radical innovations across biomedical and…
Genes, proteins, chemicals, diseases, species, mutations and cell lines named across the full text — each resolved to its canonical identifier and authoritative record.
Click any figure to enlarge with its caption.
Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
Figure 4
Figure 5
Figure 6
Figure 7
Figure 8
Figure 9
Figure 10
Figure 11
Figure 12
Figure 13
Figure 14
Figure 15
Figure 16
Figure 17
Figure 18
Figure 19
Figure 20
Figure 21
Figure 22Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsCalcium Carbonate Crystallization and Inhibition · Coral and Marine Ecosystems Studies · Marine Sponges and Natural Products