Hamilton Colloquium Series: Pupa Gilbert, University of Wisconsin, "How Organisms Build Crystals"

Crystalline biominerals cost energy but provide the organism making them with skeletal support, locomotion, biting and mastication, carnivory, gravity and magnetic field sensing, and many others. How these crystals are formed is intensely studied because it is a widespread natural phenomenon, but also because it can teach us new synthesis strategies to produced materials with targeted properties. I will discuss two key mechanisms: