Collaboration between biologists, physicists, engineers, chemists and material scientists at the Natural History Museum (London, UK) has led to a technique for creating photonic nanostructures modeled on the iridescent scales of Morpho butterflies and other examples of 'structural color'.
Three approaches are described in the paper Biomimetics of photonic nanostructure:
Research suggests that common underlying mechanisms exist in many species that can build complex photonic nanostructures. Fully understanding these self-assembly processes could allow us to create biomimetic optical structures of comparable complexity as found in nature today.