AMORPREBIO · Amorphous Precursors in Biomineralization.
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2018-09-01 → 2020-09-18
- EU contribution
- €173,076
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Amorphous Precursors in Biomineralization.
Calcium carbonate is an inorganic compound ubiquitous in nature present as minerals and biominerals (produced by organisms), with great environmental importance and extensive industrial applications. Carbonates are important biominerals building blocks of biological bodies, making up the skeletal structure of invertebrate organisms in the marine, freshwater, and terrestrial realm. Calcium carbonate is also a key compound for atmospheric CO2 sequestration through mineral trapping regulating CO2 emission levels. Therefore, due to its ubiquity and broad applications understanding the mechanisms of the CaCO3 formation and its governing parameters is of great importance. Recently, many studies have revealed that calcification, the process of CaCO3 formation, involves the precipitation of an amorphous precursor, which acts as an intermediate in the formation of the final CaCO3 crystalline mineral (e.g., calcite, vaterite or aragonite). Therefore, the main goal of this project was to understand the role of the amorphous calcium carbonate (ACC) in the (bio)mineralization process. With this aim, in this project, we characterized the amorphous precursor phase and the crystalline mineral and investigate which factors (e.g., water, presence of organic molecules) affect the transformation kinetics of the amorphous precursor into the crystalline phase (Fig. 1) using a wide range of traditional and advanced techniques. These advanced techniques, which included synchrotron (X-ray Photon Correlation Spectroscopy (XPCS)) and neutron techniques (Incoherent Inelastic Neutron Scattering (INS)), are more sensitive to small structural changes than other traditional characterization techniques and their use makes the results and outcomes of the AMORPREBIO project very original and innovative.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Calcium carbonate (CaCO3) is a widely studied inorganic compound very abundant in nature as a mineral and a biomineral. It is an important building block of biological bodies, making up the structure of invertebrate organisms. CaCO3 is also a key compound for CO2 sequestration strategies. Recent investigations have reported a so-called non-classical pathway for CaCO3 formation, which involves the formation of an amorphous precursor: amorphous calcium carbonate (ACC), which acts as an intermediate in the formation of the final CaCO3 crystalline polymorphs (calcite and aragonite). This has been reported for biominerals such as the sea urchin spicules, which are made of calcite and the shells of Haliotis tuberculata made of aragonite. However, despite these advances on the characterization of the amorphous precursor, little is known about the polymorph selection mechanism. Amorphous carbonates have also been discovered in several strains of cyanobacteria some of these cyanobacteria mineralize CaCO3 internally even in solutions that are under-saturated with respect to all CaCO3 polymorphs. These cyanobacteria have the ability of concentrating elements from the culture medium in the amorphous carbonates. They have also shown chemical selectivity, and interesting core-shell chemical distributions of some ions such as Ba2+, Ca2+ and Sr2+. These carbonates may serve as a storage reservoir of Ca and inorganic C for the cells if they can be stable on one hand under certain conditions but easily remobilizable as well on the other hand. However, the structural characteristics of these carbonate formations inclusions and their impact on the crystallization pathway are poorly known. Therefore, the goal of this project is to shed light into the role of the AAC in the (bio)mineralization process. This aim will be tackled under two approaches abiotic and biogenic induced conditions, which correspond to the two different parts proposed for the development of this project.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITE GRENOBLE ALPES · GrenobleCoordinatorFrance
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union