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Similar to teeth and bones, the sea urchin spicule is a biomineral, a composite of organic material and mineral components that the animal synthesizes from scratch, using the most readily available elements in sea water: calcium, oxygen and carbon. The fully formed spicule is composed of a single crystal with an unusual morphology. It has no facets and within 48 hours of fertilization assumes a shape that looks very much like the Mercedes-Benz logo.
These crystal shapes, as those of tooth enamel, eggshells or snails, are very different from the familiar faceted crystals grown through non-biological processes in nature. "To achieve such unusual and presumably more functional morphologies, the organisms deposit a disordered amorphous mineral phase first, and then let it slowly transform into a crystal, in which the atoms are neatly aligned into a lattice with a specific and regular orientation, while maintaining the unusual morphology," Gilbert notes.
The question the Wisconsin physicist and her colleagues sought to answer was how this amorphous-to-crystalline transition occurs. The sea urchin larval spicule is a model system for biominerals, and the first one in which the amorphous calcium carbonate precursor was discovered in 1997 by the same Israeli group co-authoring the current PNAS paper. A similar amorphous-to-crystalline transition has since been observed in adult sea urchin spines, in mollusk shells, in zebra fish bones and in tooth enamel. The resulting biominerals are extraordinarily hard and fracture resistant, compared to the minerals of which they are made.
"The amorphous minerals are deposited and they are completely disordered," Gilbert explains. "So the question we addressed is 'how does crystallinity propagate through the amorphous mineral?'"
To answer it, Gilbert and her colleagues observed spicule development in 2- to 3-day-old sea urchin larvae. The sea urchin spicule is formed inside a clump o
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| Contact: Pupa Gilbert pupa@physics.wisc.edu 608-262-5829 University of Wisconsin-Madison Source:Eurekalert |
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