Plant-inspired surfaces and interfaces for sustainable technologies

Abstract The flora and fauna in nature endow the Earth with a flourishing scene of prosperity with their diverse appearances, colours, and patterns, constituting common biopolymers and biominerals. The principles of construction of manifold structures and functionalities from fundamental building blocks in flora and fauna have inspired materials scientists to innovate artificial materials with superior properties and performance. Specifically, florae present numerous minute structures established from elementary blocks of lignin, celluloses, pectin, and hemi-celluloses to induce extraordinary demands to survive in extremely diverse environments on Earth. In this review, we introduce the robust material properties and thought-provoking functionalities in plants, such as super-wettability, liquid/ion transport properties, actuation properties, etc., and then summarize the intriguing inspirations in the development of artificial superstructures, self-cleaning surfaces, and responsive structures for the applications in energy harvesting and generation, electrochemical energy storage, environmental cleaning and remediation, and strong and tough mechanical components. It is expecting that some principles of how minute structures and functionalities of plants construct extraordinary capabilities and properties could be extracted from the current progress and some insights could be offered for future materials innovations by learning the best from nature.