Micro-organisms commonly found floating in oceans might someday be reborn as components in incredibly complex computer circuits.The single-celled algae, called diatoms, live in water and assemble a shell, or frustule, of silica by converting nutrients and light. They can adopt an incredible diversity of shapes – from simple geometric structures like triangles and squares to extremely complex 3D constructs with thousands of individual pores.More than 100,000 different species of diatom are known to exist in nature – some exhibiting features only tens of nanometres (billionths of a metre) in size – and all can rapidly self-replicate through division.Kenneth Sandhage at the Georgia Institute of Technology and colleagues hope to exploit this encyclopaedia of nano structures to develop intricate components for future electronic circuitry.
