It’s the most durable biological material you’ve never heard of: sporopollenin. This naturally occurring polymer coats and protects individual grains of plant pollen, and it’s been found in 500 million-year-old sediments. (It’s not the stuff that causes allergies ­– those are proteins within the pollen itself, not the coating.) Synthetic biologists at Colorado State University … Continue reading Synthetic biologists engineer world’s strongest biomaterial