Biomineralization Sourcebook: Characterization of Biominerals and Biomimetic Materials

What does it mean to be at the forefront of a characterization technique? Novel implementation and research, finding new ways to visualize composites, and new techniques all play a role. Yet with the myriad of advances in the field, keeping up with new and advanced techniques, often from many different areas, has become a challenge. Biomineralization Sourcebook: Characterization of Biominerals and Biomimetic Materials emphasizes the interplay between multiple techniques at their current frontiers and explores how such studies may be carried out.

The book addresses atomic and molecular structure: how it is described, detected, and assessed for importance. It then highlights additional measurements especially well-suited to looking at two- and three-dimensional systems with heterogeneous, if not hierarchical, structure. These systems enable particular aspects of biominerals and biomimetic models to be scrutinized. The text presents state-of-the-art methods to assess properties of the composite, and represents current approaches and aspirations to measuring entire biological working structures while retaining as much fine-grained biophysical information as possible. In all these chapters, authors showcase discoveries from their own programs.

Along the way, the book takes you on a tour from microscopy's eighteenth century roots, to the recent literature and diverse research programs of the contributing investigators, to the multi-million dollar National Laboratory facilities that all play their roles to illuminate the ever-fascinating biominerals. A snapshot of the state of the art in a spectrum of experimental techniques applied to a common interdisciplinary goal, where the ability to use the more advanced techniques often requires funding for collaboration and travel, the book will deepen the appreciation for the massive interdisciplinary effort underway, educate researchers across the field, and motivate new collaborations.

Elaine DiMasi is a physicist and synchrotron x-ray scattering expert, and has made her career at Brookhaven National Laboratory since 1996. Research for her PhD (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) and postdoctoral appointment (BNL) focused on structure and electronic properties in metallic condensed matter systems. Since 1999 she has investigated numerous aspects of Biomineralization including: mineralization at Langmuir films, assembly and mineralization of extracellular matrix proteins, structures of organics assembled on mineral surfaces, and microbeam diffraction mapping of mineral-organic composites and biological minerals. More recent areas of interest include lipid-mineral interactions and soft X-ray microspectroscopy. DiMasi currently is engaged in building a state of the art synchrotron x-ray scattering facility at the National Synchrotorn Light Source II, dedicated to soft- and bio-materials, specializing in aqueous interfaces, providing the capabilities to measure hierarchical structures of biominerals for a wide range of length scales and in realistic material environments.

Laurie B. Gower is an Associate Professor in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering, and supervisor of the Biomimetics Laboratory at the University of Florida. Her Master’s degree from University of Utah was in the area of Bioengineering (1990), and doctoral degree from UMASS at Amherst was in the area of Polymer Science & Engineering (1997). In the latter case, her dissertation was focused on biomineralization, making use of model systems to examine the interactions between polypeptides and crystal growth, and correlating features observed in the in vitro systems to those observed in biominerals. Most of the research in her academic career has continued along these lines of examining potential mechanisms involved in biomineralization. She discovered a novel crystallization process that relies on a polymer-induced liquid-precursor (PILP) phase, and was one of the first to suggest that biominerals might be formed from a hydrated amorphous precursor. She has built a line of evidence to suggest that this polymer-directed crystallization process may play a fundamental role in both calcium carbonate (marine exoskeletons) and calcium phosphate (bones and teeth) biomineralization, as well as calcium oxalate precipitation in kidney stones.