Biomineralization of calcium carbonate under amino acid carbon dots and its application in bioimaging

Abstract

Biomineralization is a common phenomenon in nature, and organisms can prepare functional materials with multi-level ordered structures through biomineralization. Herein, inspired by biomineralization, for the first time, we developed an amino acid quantum dots (ACDs)–CO2-Ca(OH)2 system to study the biomineralization process of CaCO3 in the presence of ACDs. The ACDs could not only control the morphology and crystal form of CaCO3 but also could be doped into CaCO3 during the formation of CaCO3 to form ACDs@CaCO3 organic–inorganic hybrid fluorescent materials which had excellent luminous ability. Meanwhile, the morphology and crystal form of CaCO3 could also be controlled by controlling the CO2 flow rate and rotation speed. After that, a possible biomineralization mechanism of CaCO3 in the presence of ACDs was proposed. Finally, the synthetic spherical ACDs@CaCO3 were applied to the field of biological imaging for the first time. Our work not only provides new bionic methods for the synthesis of multifunctional biomineralized materials and new insights for further understanding of biomineralization mechanism, but also the synthesized new biomineralization fluorescent materials have great application potential in the field of bioimaging.

Keywords

• Biomineralization
• Calcium carbonate
• Amino acid carbon dots
• Morphology and crystal form
• Biological imaging