Biomimetic vaterite formation at surfaces structurally templated by oligo(glutamic acid) peptides

This is the publisher’s final pdf. The published article is copyrighted by the Royal Society of Chemistry and can be found at: http://pubs.rsc.org/en/Journals/JournalIssues/CC#!recentarticles&advPrevious studies have reported that the metastable vaterite phase of calcium carbonate can be stabilized in solution by acidic additives. Here we demonstrate that vaterite can also be stabilized directly at surfaces by engineered peptides. Our data show that the mineralisation occurs in a 'self-templating' process where calcium ions restructure the peptide backbone, which in turn allows for effective vaterite precipitation