Understanding the interfacial science of nature-inspired materials for versatile applications

Recently, nature-inspired materials have received substantial attention in the scientific community due to their intriguing characteristics, such as the ability to tailor or mimic stimuli. This characteristic has enabled the versatility of these materials for various applications, such as aerospace, automotive, biomedical, biological, and energy harvesting and storage applications. These nature-mimicking materials require a sensible environment that could trigger their function as such in living matter. To realize such an environment, an interface must be developed that can reciprocate the desired functionality of biomimetics between the material's external stimuli and response behavior. This interfacing of materials comes into the picture since the materials derived are nanosized, tailoring is possible but also because of the sophisticated environment, such as the stability of the dispersion, i.e., colloids, functionalization, formation of chiral networks, supramolecular chemistry, and click chemistry. Additionally, interfacial materials with unique wettabilities have also grown to be a vibrant topic of material science. By utilizing the distinctive surface characteristics of materials and interfaces produced by biomimetic techniques, one can create efficient solutions for various environmental issues. The concept, mechanisms, and fabrication methods of interfacial materials with particular wettabilities are presented in this review, which also evaluate their potential use in environmental applications. Hence, in the current paper, various bioinspired materials and their colloidal and interfacial science for versatile applications are highlighted. We subsequently identified the lacuna, and possible solutions to appraise this new area for versatile application are enlightening. This review enables researchers to adopt design strategies to develop new classes of nature-inspired materials for potential applications.