Discovery of new crystallization pathways in forming biominerals

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Non-technical description Perfect crystals are formed when atoms order themselves in a regular geometry. This crystallization happens all the time in nature, resulting in gemstones, minerals, and rocks, but it is also relevant to and widespread in industry, for example to make semiconductor crystals for electronics, or to produce crystalline chemicals, pharmaceuticals, or food products. Understanding crystallization, therefore, promotes the progress of science and benefits society by improving fundamental knowledge and applied materials production. The problem, however, is that crystallization in all these natural and synthetic systems happens too fast, at high temperature, and at high pressure, making it difficult or impossible to observe crystallization as it happens. Researchers have a better chance to understand crystallization by observing it in biominerals, such as coral skeletons and seashells, where crystals grow at room temperature, ambient pressure, and very, very slowly, taking a day or so to crystallize. This research will involve talented undergraduate students who are members of underrepresented minorities in science and academia, and make them publish peer-reviewed journal articles, as previously done by these researchers. Technical descriptionObserving crystallization as it happens reveals the presence or absence of transient precursor phases, which can be crystalline or amorphous minerals. Preliminary, unpublished, unconfirmed data suggest that there are two kinds of transient precursors to biomineral formation: crystalline and amorphous. Transient crystalline phases have only been observed once before in only one biomineral, planktonic foraminifera, whereas transient amorphous phases have been observed extensively and repeatedly sea urchin spicules and spines, in mollusk shells, and in coral skeletons. The principal investigator and her group will strive explore the existence of transient crystalline precursors in many different biominerals, by analyzing data they already have and new data, to be acquired on new, unexplored biominerals: brachiopods and benthic foraminifera. They will develop software to build the energy landscapes that determine crystallization rates for all transient and stable phases, then use this software to analyze data new and old. They will develop machine learning and principal component analysis to find new, unknown mineral phases in new and old data. Even if they discover that transient crystalline phases do not exist in most biominerals, the new energy landscapes, the new biominerals and their formation mechanisms, and the potential new phases identified by machine learning in new and old data will make this research produce multiple interesting discoveries, while employing and training talented underrepresented undergraduate students.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.