Scope of the project
Scope of the project
Embedded Files
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, understanding the mechanisms of the CaCO3 formation and its governing parameters is of great importance.
Fig. 1. Amorphous calcium carbonate (ACC) crystallization factors studied in this project. Calcite, aragonite and vaterite are calcium carbonates crystalline polymorphs, which means that they have the same composition CaCO3 but different structure.
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 is to understand the role of the amorphous calcium carbonate (ACC) in the (bio)mineralization process. With this aim, in this project we characterize 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).
The innovative character of this project is the use of advanced synchrotron and neutron techniques, such as X-ray Photon Correlation Spectroscopy (XPCS) and Incoherent Inelastic Neutron Scattering (INS) that are more sensitive to small structural changes than other traditional characterization techniques.
The 'Amorphous precursors in biomineralization' (AMORPREBIO) project has been funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement 747597
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse