In-situ crystallography of protein single crystals produced by marine sponges

Nature is known to form a variety of complex silica-based architectures with exquisite structural control. Among them are the glass spicules in marine sponges that exhibit a diversity of highly regular three-dimensional branched morphologies, which are a paradigm example of symmetry in biological systems. During spicule formation, the process of silica formation and deposition is templated by organic filaments that are composed of proteins, called silicateins, which are arranged in a mesoscopic single crystal-like structure. The topic of this proposal is the study of the silicatein crystal polymorphism in-situ, inside the biomineralized amorphous glass tissue.