THE tricks that microscopic sea creatures use to build their skeletons are hinting at ways to construct delicate, tailor-made silica structures.
The single-celled creatures called diatoms build their cell walls from silica, otherwise known as silicon dioxide. The silicon comes dissolved in seawater, but how the minuscule creatures convert it into silica is a mystery.
But now Christopher Knight and his team at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign think they have discovered its secret. They let the diatom
Knight suspects that the diatom uses the chemical as an intermediate stage in silica production. He hopes it will eventually be ...
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