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Inorganic, non-metallic materials exhibit interesting passive and active mechanical properties, when structured hierarchically down to the nanometer scale by biotemplating. While nature does provide a great wealth of structural templates, tailoring biotemplated materials' architectures on defined hierarchical levels is a desirable goal. We combine biotemplating techniques, developed earlier with two novel approaches to create tailored templates, namely the utilization of microbial phototaxis, and rheotaxis. The generally uncommon ductilities of biotemplated, hierarchically and anisotropically structured silica materials were determined and traced via a stick-slip model of parallel rods. Further, we observed passive moisture-driven bilayer actuation in silica structures derived from actuating biological templates, illustrating one of the attainable novel properties. With regard to the creation of tailored templates by phototaxis, the directions, velocities and patterns of movement of a selection of microbe species were found to depend on illumination brightness, wavelength, direction, and also the culturing conditions. Further, rheotactical structuring of first promising tailored templates was achieved in custom-built planar and cylindrical flow cells.
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