Morphogenesis of highly ordered mesoporous structures produced by single cell organisms

Nature is known to form a variety of complex architectures with exquisite structural control. These include 2D mesoporous silica structures found in the cell walls of diatoms and 3D mesoporous crystalline calcite structures found in the cysts of some dinoflagellates. Both examples exhibit long-range morphological regularity, which is beyond the reach of current human technology. In the proposed experiment, we will apply nano-holotomography imaging method to follow the morphological evolution of commonly studied model species of diatoms and dinoflagellates with the goal of: (i) understanding the forces and thermodynamic constraints that govern the formation of highly regular 2D and 3D mesoporous biomineralized structures (morphogenesis); and (ii) correlating between the morphology and the mechanical performance of these architectures (function).