Anisotropic aerogels are presented as promising novel scaffolds in materials science. However, its facile fabrication continues being a challenge. A directional freezecasting process was used by Chu and Qu [256] to form a CNC anisotropic aerogel taking advantage of its liquid crystalline ordered conformation. The produced CNC aerogels presented lamellar macrostructural features and optical anisotropy (Fig. 5.13). In addition, they proved that this directional freezing was kept in the system CNCsilica, obtaining anisotropic silica aerogels with an ordered mesopore-imprinted structure template by the liquid crystalline CNC.