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Material witness

Bringing crystals to life

Nature Materials volume 11, page 840 (2012)Cite this article

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Attempts to connect crystals to the life sciences have a long history, much of it tinged with mysticism. Kepler invoked a mysterious 'formative principle' to account for the vegetative intricacy of snowflakes; Newton attributed to something like organic growth the 'treelike' salt precipitates of silica gardens. In the mid-eighteenth century a Swedish mineralogist could write that “there are naturalists who maintain that minerals have a life like that which vegetation enjoys”. The discovery of liquid crystals in the late nineteenth century was interpreted by Ernst Haeckel as the missing link between crystalline order and organic plasticity of form, and in some ways he was not wrong: liquid crystalline and other mesophases abound in living organisms, from the reflective pigmented stacks of animal 'structural colours' to the fibrous alignment of silk and the membranes that template complex biominerals.

Meanwhile, the connection between quasi-regular structures and the encoding of information was introduced with Schrödinger's famous invocation of an 'aperiodic crystal' as the material basis of genetics — an insight validated by the discovery of the structure of DNA. It is increasingly apparent that DNA in fact has a hierarchy of structural ordering in vivo, including liquid crystal phases, and that important information is encoded at higher levels than the primary sequence, for example in the condensed phases of chromatin. The possibility that inorganic crystals might enable the storage, transmission and mutation of 'genetic' information — for example in the stacking sequences of clays — was introduced to prebiotic chemistry by Graham Cairns-Smith in the 1960s.

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  1. Philip Ball
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Ball, P. Bringing crystals to life. Nature Mater 11, 840 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat3437

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