In the race to make advanced technologies cheaper, cleaner and more efficient, scientists are turning to an unlikely teacher: a small marine mollusk. Researchers at UC Irvine, working with partners in Japan, have discovered how chitons — tiny sea creatures that live in intertidal areas across the world — build their ultra-hard teeth layer by layer. That insight is now guiding efforts to develop cleaner, more precise methods for synthesizing the critical materials that power everything from fuel cells to next-generation electronics.

“Chiton grow new teeth every few days that are superior to materials used in industrial cutting tools, grinding media, dental implants, surgical implants and protective coatings, yet they are made at room temperature and with nanoscale precision," says David Kisailus, UC Irvine professor of materials and engineering, and the head of the school's Biomimetic and Nanostructured Materials Laboratory. "We can learn a lot from these biological designs and processes.”

Chitons have 80 rows of teeth, and use the front row to scrape away rocks and consume algae. In early studies of the mollusk dating back to 2007, Kisailus found that chiton teeth were made of a material known as magnetite, the hardest biological mineral found in nature. Chitons are also able to form new sets of teeth every two to three days, inspiring his lab's newly-released research with Japan's Okayama and Toho universities, which revealed the exact process by which chiton teeth are formed, where proteins are shuttled through microscopic nano-tubules into teeth, and then bind to other organic structures before eventually forming into ultra-hard magnetite. 

By studying this process, researchers were given a blueprint for how nature builds materials at the nano scale, inspiring cleaner and more cost-effective ways to produce other nanostructured materials, including those used in lithium-ion batteries and hydrogen fuel cells.

"If nature can guide the precision of its nano-structures, could we learn from the processes it uses to actually make engineered materials?" says Kisailus. "And could we make those materials with precise architectures to make them perform even better?"

As an example, Kisailus points to another project he currently has with a Swiss company that's licensing his lab's patents on controlling nanostructure growth for materials in hydrogen fuel cells. Typically, hydrogen cells require platinum, which costs roughly $1,400 an ounce, to act as a catalyst. Inspired by biological nanostructures found in nature, Kisailus's lab developed a way to engineer nano-particles and instead synthesize cobalt oxide to use as an alternative catalyst, at less than 1% the cost of platinum to boot.

His lab also received a $4 million grant from the U.S. Air Force in 2024, to study how microbes can be used to extract rare earth elements, and even potentially mine elements in extreme, remote environments like the moon, Mars and asteroids.

"What we're finding with that study is that the proteins that chiton teeth are using to bind to iron during the mineralization process are similar to the microbes that are extracting minerals from rock," Kisailus explains. "Could we then take the protein itself, and use that to provide templates for making batteries, or extracting rare earth minerals from mines?"

Ultimately, it could reduce our reliance on other countries for rare earth minerals, he adds, and produce what he describes as a "feedstock of organic material to build batteries." Microbes could also be used as an alternative to acids that leach minerals from the ground but contaminate the surrounding environment.

That research could even impact the fundamental processes by which materials are synthesized for semiconductors and computer chips. Today, we use a technique that requires the use of toxic gases and high temperatures known as chemical vapor deposition (CVD), to create nanomaterials for semiconductors. What chitons have shown researchers, though, is how that can be accomplished in nature with less energy at room temperature, and without the use of CVD's toxic gases.

For manufacturers and supply chain leaders, these discoveries hint at a future where critical materials are produced more sustainably, affordably, and closer to home. By borrowing design principles perfected by nature, researchers like Kisailus are laying the groundwork for technologies that could ease supply bottlenecks, cut costs, and reduce environmental impact, and transform how industries source and produce the advanced materials that power modern life.