Sponges are some of the oldest animals on Earth. They live in a wide range of waters, from lakes to deep oceans. Remarkably, the skeleton of some sponges is built out of a network of highly symmetrical glass structures. These glass scaffolds have intrigued researchers for a long time. How do sponges manipulate disordered glass into the skeletal elements which are so regular? Researchers from B CUBE—Center for Molecular Bioengineering at TU Dresden together with the teams from the Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden (cfaed) and the Swiss Light Source at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland are the first to determine the three dimensional (3-D) structure of a protein responsible for glass formation in sponges. They explain how the earliest and, in fact, the only known natural protein-mineral crystal is formed. The results were published in the journal PNAS.
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Source: Phys.org