Abstract
Biomineralization is a typical interdisciplinary subject attracting biologists, chemists, and geologists to figure out its potential mechanism. A mounting number of studies have revealed that the classical nucleation theory is not suitable for all nucleation process of biominerals, and phase-separated structures such as polymer-induced liquid precursors (PILPs) play essential roles in the non-classical nucleation processes. These structures are able to play diverse roles biologically or pathologically, and could also give inspiring clues to bionic applications. However, a lot of confusion and dispute occurred due to the intricacy and interdisciplinary nature of liquid precursors. Researchers in different fields may have different opinions because the terminology and current state of understanding is not common knowledge. As a result, our team reviewed the most recent articles focusing on the nucleation processes of various biominerals to clarify the state-of-the-art understanding of some essential concepts and guide the newcomers to enter this intricate but charming field.
Highlights
Biomineralization is an amazing phenomenon in nature
Wolf et al (2008) provided more convincing evidence by designing an ultrasonic trap and observing with synchrotron X-ray scattering techniques in order to achieve a real-time and less-disturbance observation of the nucleation process. Their experiments further proved that amorphous calcium carbonate (ACC) could increase in Liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) manners with the increasing super-saturation degrees without any additions. These facts indicated that LLPS could be an inherent property of calcium carbonate when nucleating from a mother phase, and polymers could act as promoters or participants of the LLPS process, which could be called polymer-induced liquid precursors (PILPs)
Theories based on LLPS are becoming popular, and researches about the relationship between LLPS and the non-classical nucleation theory are increasing
Summary
Biomineralization refers to a charming process describing the formation of various biominerals participated by complex interactions of organic and inorganic molecules (Berendsen and Olsen, 2015; Kim et al, 2016; Grünewald et al, 2020; Li et al, 2020; Schoeppler et al, 2021; Wu et al, 2021) It is a typical interdisciplinary subject attracting biologists (Muñoz et al, 2019), chemists (Yuan et al, 2019), and geologists (Sivaguru et al, 2018; Sivaguru et al, 2020; Sivaguru et al, 2021) to figure out its potential mechanisms, and provide inspiring clues to bionic applications (Cho et al, 2018). This research emphasized the crucial roles of organic molecules in the crystal growth part of biomineralization (Jiang et al, 2018) These highly organized, attractive architectures indicate the ability of organisms to control crystal nucleation and growth, which has not been fully understood. It seems hard to figure out the global crystallization or biomineralization process without a better understanding of the nucleation process
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