Life is hierarchically structured down to the micro-and nanoscale, e.g., organs - tissues - cells - organelles - biomolecules. For the past half-century, humankind has been engineering on the same scale, e.g., nanoengineered electronic circuits and sensors have formed the basis of the Information Age. Interestingly, the world of microbiology differs crucially from that of engineering. Biologic materials are typically soft; engineered materials are stiff. Structuring in biology is water-based and relies on self-assembly; engineered structuring is often top-down and in dry environments. Whereas small-scale engineered systems are still typically limited in their functionality (e.g., only sensing or information processing), biologic microsystems (e.g., insects) integrate multiple functions, such as sensing, information processing, actuation, and energy supply, in a single unit. Unsurprisingly, there are many efforts in combining the merits of these both worlds. I here show some recent examples where we synthesized biohybrid constructs of synthetic and biologic matter with new functionalities on the sub-micrometre scale: DNA-templated gold nanowires (1,2), spider silk nanowires (3) and nanomembranes (4,5), and polymer-based nanostructures for protein structuring (6) and cell manipulation (7).