Adolphe Merkle Institute group leader Dr. Viola Vogler-Neuling has been awarded an Ambizione fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) — one of Switzerland’s most competitive research grants. Over the next four years, her team will investigate how nature creates some of its most dazzling colors and explore ways to reproduce them sustainably in the lab.

While most colors around us come from chemical pigments, nature has another trick up its sleeve. The shimmering blue of a morpho butterfly’s wing or the iridescent green of a peacock feather is not due to dyes, but to structural color — an optical effect created when three-dimensional nanostructures interact with light. These structures interfere with light waves, producing colors that never fade, as 500-million-year-old fossils have shown us.

Scientists still do not fully understand how such intricate nanostructures form in living organisms. In butterflies, they develop during metamorphosis, but the precise steps leading there and the key molecules involved remain a mystery. To address this, Dr. Vogler and her team will reverse-engineer millions of years of evolution by analyzing the molecular building blocks — lipids and proteins — present in the epithelial cells of butterfly species at different stages of development. This will help identify which specific components contribute to the formation of photonic nanostructures. They will then attempt to recreate the structures artificially, using the same types of materials, including a special class of liquid crystals.  By mimicking the natural self-assembly process, the aim is to create nanostructures at a scale of several hundred nanometers, which is required to manipulate visible light. In parallel, computer simulations based on particle dynamics will be developed to predict and optimize the formation of these complex architectures.

If successful, the research could lead to biodegradable photonic pigments inspired by nature, offering brilliant, long-lasting colors without toxic chemicals or fading. Such materials could be used in displays, optical devices, and many other technologies, while advancing our fundamental understanding of how nature creates long-lasting colors.

The funding from the SNSF’s Ambizione program is specifically designed to enhance the scientific profile of researchers from Switzerland and abroad and help them become scientifically independent early in their careers with a project of their own. Vogler's project perfectly embodies this goal through groundbreaking interdisciplinary research that bridges physics, chemistry, computational science, and biology.