Within 200 years since the industrial revolution manufacturing systems have often changed their faces. Emerging nations, new markets, new inventions and the changing needs of the society forced them to adapt. Until today, the arising challenges are immensely diverse: highly individualized products, decreasing manufacturing time, limited resources and critical ecological footprints are only a few of them. Oftentimes solutions for these issues and other future requirements can be found by interrogating nature. Applying knowledge of biological principles to industrial manufacturing processes is recently referred to as '‘biological transformation of manufacturing systems”. Hereby three levels of a biological transformation are introduced, starting from inspiration over integration to the interaction of biological and technical systems. The paper illustrates the idea of biological transformation with specific examples for each level. On the inspiration-level the design of manufacturing systems with elements of natural ecosystems is described. Thus flexibility is increased, material cycles are closed and waste will be reduced. Furthermore the integration-level is illustrated by the use of microorganisms in cutting fluids. Finally, evolutionary computing within an automatic joining cell is shown as an example for the interaction-level.