Cephalopod-inspired optical engineering of human cells

Although many animals have evolved intrinsic transparency for the purpose of concealment, the development of dynamic, that is, controllable and reversible, transparency for living human cells and tissues has remained elusive to date. Here, by drawing inspiration from the structures and functionalities of adaptive cephalopod skin cells, we design and engineer human cells that contain reconfigurable protein-based photonic architectures and, as a result, possess tunable transparency-changing and light-scattering capabilities. Our findings may lead to the development of unique biophotonic tools for applications in materials science and bioengineering and may also facilitate an improved understanding of a wide range of biological systems. While organisms like squid can adaptively modulate the optical properties of their tissues, human cells lack analogous abilities. Here the authors engineer human cells to produce protein architectures with tunable light scattering functionalities.