S. Oliver et al., LAMELLAR ALUMINOPHOSPHATES WITH SURFACE PATTERNS THAT MIMIC DIATOM AND RADIOLARIAN MICROSKELETONS, Nature, 378(6552), 1995, pp. 47-50
ORGANISMS such as diatoms and radiolaria synthesize elaborate biominer
al exoskeletons which display hierarchical structures patterned on len
gth scales from less than a micrometre to millimetres. Synthetic mater
ials chemistry, in contrast, has traditionally been able to achieve re
gular patterning only on microscopic (<10 Angstrom) and more recently(
1-3) mesoscopic (10-10(3) Angstrom) length scales. Here we report the
synthesis of crystalline, lamellar aluminophosphate structures that ar
e patterned on the submicrometre-to-millimetre scales found in the liv
ing world. As in the syntheses of ordered mesoporous solids(1-3), our
approach involves templating by self-assembled organic aggregates, and
we propose that the larger scale of the patterning here arises from t
he involvement of vesicle templates rather than the micelle-like or bi
layer structures thought to be responsible for mesoscale pattern forma
tion(1-3).