Anisotropic textured surfaces represent key structural components utilized by various animals and plants to gain a competitive advantage for survival. For example, a closer look at complex structures in insect wings and lizard toes reveal organized structured features at the microscopic scale. These structures are composed of millions of aligned columns per square millimeter, which create novel anisotropic properties. We have demonstrated that these structures can be fabricated synthetically by an oblique angle polymerization (OAP) method. OAP allows us to tune the chemical properties of nanostructured surfaces and film morphology to control the physicochemical properties of the resulting films, such as hydrophobicity, porosity, electrochemistry, chemical reactivity, surface energy and crystallinity. In this talk, we will describe unique anisotropic physicochemical properties (i.e. morphing/folding, wetting, and friction) of well-ordered arrays of nano-rods/tubes, which mimic biological structures at the microscopic scale. We will also present results concerning the use of these films for biomedical and biosensors applications.