Biomineralization: Life Harnessing Mineral Growth for Over Four Billion Years (Via Zoom)

October 26, 6:30pm-8:00pm (Central Time)

$15 preregistered/prepaid.

Registration Deadline: October 24 (A link will be sent to you one day prior to the event).

The survival of all forms of Life on Earth through geological time has depended on controlling mineral growth within the environments it inhabits. This process, called biomineralization, had been an essential, unavoidable and ubiquitously disturbed force of nature that has caused essential strategic benefits (like forming bones for muscle attachment), as well as profound practical problems and impediments (such as the growth of kidney stones). This presentation will explore the scientific renaissance being driven by newly developed molecular and microscopy tools, into the process of biomineralization. Results are reframing our basic approaches to the grand challenges that face society regarding the environment, energy, medicine, and space exploration.

Bruce Fouke is a professor in Geology, Integrative Biology at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He also serves as Director of the Illinois Roy J. Carver Biotechnology Center. His progressive geological and biological (geobiology) research investigates how living and fossil organisms have developed biomaterialization strategies to survive environmental change. This includes the study of: (1) the control of sea surfaces temperature and coral skeletal growth; (2) the global emergence of infectious marine diseases; (3) enhanced hydrocarbon recovery; (4) the survival of heat-loving  (thermophilic bacteria in hot springs; (5) the developments of antibiotic resistance in response to antibiotic treatments; (6) timing of the last flow of water in ancient Roman aqueducts; (7) microbe-human-water rock interactions during kidney stone formation.

This may be of interest also:

“A World in a Grain of Sand: New Discoveries in Kidney Stones” (18 min.) Click here to view.

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