The word "abalone" is correct and usable in written English.
It typically refers to a large sea snail. For example, you could say: "I ate some delicious abalone at a seafood restaurant last night."
If an abalone has within its DNA the ability to code for the proteins needed to gather the materials to construct a shell, would it be possible to tinker with the DNA sequences in other creatures to gather some of the elements on the periodic table?
If that was possible, then the viruses might be used as a template to grow and assemble electronic circuits, much like an abalone constructs its shell.
The trouble is, her idea born from an abalone shell seems bound to turn up even more problems which are waiting to be solved.
From the early 1920s to the late 1930s, for example, a San Francisco restaurant would charge only $6-7 6-7 today's money, for a serving of abalone, a todayof mollusc.
Diving for abalone, the boy comes face to face with a huge fish, a terrifying-looking but friendly groper.
Where the neighbouring Athapaskan tribes, who had crossed the strait on snowshoes, had dozens of terms for the condition of ice and snow, Eyak vocabulary was rich with particular words for black abalone, red abalone, ribbon weed and tubular kelp, drag nets and dipping nets and different sizes of rope.
A "workmanlike" discussion (according to the Americans) was followed by a light lunch of braised abalone and black pepper mantis prawn.
Fishermen took 65 tonnes of white abalone in 1972.
These natural products contain exquisite nanostructures, like the iridescent shells of abalone, says Ms Belcher.
Paul Dayton and Mia Tegner from Scripps have tracked the decline of the white abalone, a shellfish living in the kelp off the Californian coast that has been ruthlessly pursued.
Indeed, Dr Belcher says her work was inspired by the way an abalone is genetically programmed to collect calcium from seawater in order to grow its shell.
