Building like a Coral-Parallelized, Multiscale Biofabrication.

Abstract

Visible from space or residing in the depths of the ocean, scleractinian corals engineer vast ecosystems supporting high biodiversity and providing essential ecosystem services. By creating these ecosystems, corals address significant challenges in material science, generating skeletal materials that are stiff, strong, and inherently circular-even in conditions where energy and building resources can be scarce or energetically expensive to synthesize. Understanding coral skeletal materials has progressed due to their exceptional mechanical properties, potential biocompatibility, and, in case of cold-water corals, their ability to be synthesized in darkness, at low temperature, and with limited energy resources. These natural, sustainable processes offer inspiring blueprints for the development of transformative new materials, which may drive radical innovations across biomedical and engineering applications. In this perspective, we synthesize the current state of knowledge on the biomineralization process of corals, including the two prevailing viewpoints-biologically controlled vs. physicochemical controlled biomineralization. We then recast coral growth as a multiscale, parallelized biofabrication process, that can catalyse the development of next-generation materials technologies. These insights outline pathways to sustainable, self-organising, and energy-efficient manufacturing with broad relevance to structural materials, biomaterials, and regenerative engineering. Ultimately, we strive to answer: "How to build like a coral?"