materialsscienceandengineering:

Perovskites are materials that are increasingly popular for a wide range of applications because of their remarkable electrical, optical, and photonic properties. Perovskite materials have the potential to revolutionize the fields of solar energy, sensing and detecting, photocatalysis, lasers, and others.

The properties of perovskites can be tuned for specific applications by changing their chemical composition and internal architecture, including the distribution and orientation of its crystal structure. At the moment, the ability to influence these properties is massively limited by manufacturing methods. A team of scientists at TU Dresden was able to create perovskites with unique nano-architectures and crystal properties from algae, taking advantage of years of evolution of these single-celled organisms.

Taking Advantage of the Evolution

“Unicellular organisms have responded over hundreds of millions of years to a wide range of environmental factors such as temperature, pH, and mechanical stress. As a result, some of them evolved to produce absolutely unique biomaterials that are exclusive to nature,” says Dr. Igor Zlotnikov, research group leader at the B CUBE – Center for Molecular Bioengineering who led the study. “Minerals formed by living organisms often exhibit structural and crystallographic characteristics that are far beyond the production capacities offered by current synthetic methods.”

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