Carbohydrate biomass constitutes an abundant and renewable resource that is attracting growing interest as a biomaterial. Convincingly the use of different natural "elementary bricks", from oligosaccharides to fibers found in biomass, when mimicking self-assembly as Nature does, is a promising field towards innovative nanostructured biomaterials, leading to eco-friendly manufacturing processes of various devices.

Indeed, the self-assembly at the nanoscale level of plant-based materials, via an elegant bottom-up approach, allows reaching very high-resolution patterning (sub-10nm) never attained to date by petroleum-based molecules, thus providing them with novel properties.