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
Navicula pelliculosa take up radioactive silicon-29, and used nuclear
magnetic resonance to track what it reacted with inside the creature. This…
