Meeting Abstract

89.3  Friday, Jan. 7  Optical probing and modeling of structural reflections from proteinaceous shapes in squid HOLT, A. L.*; SWEENEY, A. M.; MORSE, D. E.; Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; Univ. of California, Santa Barbara holt@lifesci.ucsb.edu

Beauty is a hallmark of structural color in the natural world. From sky, to ground, to sea, nature has perfected the art of reflection-based color but its uses are much more intricate that that of merely being beautiful. Many examples of structural color such as the complex three-dimensional motifs of butterfly wings and beetle shells, are fixed in place and composed of a hard high refractive index material such as chitin. However, intriguing systems found in squid comprised of proteins called reflectins offer new biophotonic and biochemical perspectives into the design, self-assembly and modeling of three-dimensional iridescent proteinaceous structures. Depending on the evolutionarily advantageous effect, structures can range from well-ordered subcellular reflectors such as dynamic Bragg stacks found in the skin or packed cell-sized pearlesque cloaking reflectors found in their eye. Here we show a variety of techniques for experimentally examining and modeling the optical reflections from these novel structures in the basis of their environment from which they evolved. With optical modeling and spectroscopic examination, we gain important insight into complex structures for potential photonic biomimicry.