Over the past few decades, people have gained a strong interest towards getting inspiration from biology and bionics, as well as the mimic biological characteristics of organ. The passion is likely to be amplified by the emergence of cheap and easy-to-use genome-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9, which has dramatically displayed the possibilities of altering organisms or their products.
In addition, bionics recently-obtained great achievements also include mimicking of aquaporin molecules (proteins that form pores in the membranes of cells) for desalinization; the production of spider silk with manufacturing strength and flexibility; the efficiency of the development in new light synthesis catalyst to improve the solar cell.
Bioinspiration has played an important role in efforts to solve problems related to health, energy efficiency, food safety and other biological issues (teduglutide). To achieve this, researchers must make better use of knowledge and expertise of biologists, ecologists, microbiologists or biochemists, and specialists in evolution, organization, cell level, or molecules.
The field of biomimicry mostly involves chemists, engineers and materials scientists. Over the past three months, Thomson Reuters Web of Science has included about 300 bionics papers, among which fewer than 8% is focused on biomimetics. And in most papers on biomimetics, the species involved are very monotonous. Taking the papers published last year as the example, more than 80% researchers consider only one species or refer to a biological element such as cells and enzymes in only a generalized way.
With around 1.5 million described species, and probably some 9 million eukaryotic species in existence, bionics research may still remain in the surface of biological inspiration. Biologists that have obtained a wealth of expertise can provide guidance for the diversity of natural and experimental systems. Understanding the characteristics of a particular organism can bring special applications. On the other hand, biologists can help researchers to the problem at hand with a particular species, environmental conditions or evolutionary match. For example, the general conditions of understanding the evolution of altruism, such as a high probability of repeated encounters, may be able to provide a reference for architects and urban planners, to promote cooperation among people.
Evolutionary biologists, in particular, could help biomimicry researchers to use entire species evolutionary chain to test the formation and function of environment-related theory. Comparative study has also found a species of copy limitations. Prosperity through evolution of species must have a lot of success factors, such as favorable genetic variation.
Currently, various funds are increasingly supporting research in innovative biological research and more applied factors. The following four points to promote more crossover between biology and biomimetics are as followed.
1. Changes to education could encourage bionics researchers to gain more biological expertise. At present, undergraduates engaged in bionics are more likely to choose the ‘application field’, such as engineering, architecture or chemistry. These students should be required to take courses in the area of biology, as well as chemistry and molecular biology.
2. We need textbooks that cover the basic concepts of biology principles, rather than just focusing on the applications.
3. Promoting the opportunities of interdisciplinary cooperation could also be helpful. In order to increase opportunities for the cooperation of biologists and bionics, we should convene an international conference, which could allow biologists and those interested in bioinspired applications to work together based on their probable ability to solve a problem.
4. Certain relevant enterprises should hire more biologists, because teamwork is the key to making bionics research gain more successes.
In brief, science research requires great teamwork, so it’s necessary to make scientists all over the world participate together, in order to achieve the goal of improving people’s modern life to a better degree.