Mechanically encoded cellular shapes for synthesis of anisotropic mesoporous particles

The asymmetry that pervades molecular mechanisms of living systems increasingly informs the aims of synthetic chemistry, particularly in the development of catalysts, particles, nanomaterials, and their assemblies. For particle synthesis, overcoming viscous forces to produce complex, nonspherical shapes is particularly challenging; a problem that is continuously solved in nature when observing dynamic biological entities such as cells. Here we bridge these dynamics to synthetic chemistry and show that the intrinsic asymmetric shapes of erythrocytes can be directed, captured, and translated into composites and inorganic particles using a process of nanoscale silica-bioreplication. We show that crucial aspects in particle design such as particle-particle interactions, pore size, and macromolecular accessibility can be tuned using cellular responses. The durability of resultant particles provides opportunities for shape-preserving transformations into metallic, semiconductive, and ferromagnetic particles and assemblies. The ability to use cellular responses as "structure directing agents" offers an unprecedented toolset to design colloidal-scale materials.