Oral Presentation 26th ACMM “2020 Visions in Microscopy”

Invited talk - Microscopy strategies to reveal the mystery of butterfly nanostructure formation (#134)

Gerd E Schröder-Turk 1 2
  1. Department of Applied Maths, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia
  2. Murdoch University, Murdoch, WA, Australia

Many butterflies, and insects more generally, feature nanostructures whose functional purpose and whose biogenesis are intriguing. Especially the latter -the formation mechanism of these nanostructures- is often hard to decipher due to the difficulties that biological samples often pose for in-vivo and post-mortem microscopy studies, including low contrasts, difficult accessibility, living tissue, etc. A particularly beautiful example of such a nanostructure is the chitin Single Gyroid structure which is a highly-symmetric and regular network-like porous structure, with lengthscale of around 300nm, which the butterfly employs as a photonic crystal material to generate its green coloration.