Two recent papers show how mixing a little bit of something from nature with a little metal from the lab can lead to interesting results. As a consequence, an exciting new field mixing natural products and standard lab techniques and chemicals seems to be emerging.
D Matthew Eby of Florida's Tyndall Air Force Base and colleagues showed that using the enzyme lysozyme from chicken eggs mixed with silver acetate in methanol, and exposing the mixture to light, is an inexpensive way to produce copious quantities of antibacterial silver nanoparticles. Meanwhile, Seung-Mo Lee of the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics in Halle and colleagues have shown that zinc, titanium or aluminium can greatly enhance the toughness of spider silk.
Further reading
D Matthew Eby et al. 2009 ACS Nano 3 984.
S-M Lee et al. 2009 Science 324 488.