Results of a large-scale innovative Citizen Science experiment called Project M which involved over 1000 scientists, 800 samples and 110 UK secondary schools in a huge experiment will be published in the prestigious RSC (Royal Society of Chemistry) journal CrystEngComm on 29 January 2024. The paper is titled: “Project M: Investigating the effect of additives on calcium carbonate crystallisation through a school citizen science program”. The paper shares a giant set of results from the school citizen scientists who collaborated with a team at Diamond to find out how different additives affect the different forms of calcium carbonate produced. These additives affect the type of calcium carbonate that forms, and thus its properties and potential applications. Being able to easily produce different forms of calcium carbonate could be very important for manufacturing.
Lead authors Claire Murray, Visiting Scientist at Diamond and Julia Parker, Diamond Principal Beamline Scientist and expert in calcium carbonate science who conceptualised the project, analysed the data, wrote and edited the manuscript explain that despite nature’s ability to precisely control calcium carbonate formation in shells and skeletons, laboratories around the world are often unable to exact the same level of control over how calcium carbonate forms. Nature uses molecules like amino acids and proteins to direct the formation of calcium carbonate, so we were interested in discovering how some of these molecules affect the calcium carbonate that we make in the lab.
Project M engaged the students and teachers as scientists, making different samples of calcium carbonate under varying conditions with different additives. 800 of these samples were then analysed in just 24 hours in April 2017 using the X-ray powder diffraction technique at on beamline I11 at Diamond Light Source, the UK’s national synchrotron. This created a giant set of results which form the basis of the publication. A systematic study of this scale has never been completed anywhere else in the world.
The goal of this project was to find out how using different additives like amino acids affect the structure of the calcium carbonate. The mineral has three main forms called ‘polymorphs’ – vaterite, calcite and aragonite – which can be identified using X-ray powder diffraction at Diamond’s beamline l11. Diamond Light Source produces one of the brightest X-ray beams on planet Earth, which allow scientists to understand the atomic structure of materials. Scientists come from all over the UK and further afield to use these X-rays – as well as infrared and ultraviolet light – to make better drugs, understand the natural world, and create futuristic materials. Understanding the impact of different additives on the production of polymorphs is of huge interest in industry such as in manufacturing, medical applications such as tissue engineering and the design of drug-delivery systems, and even cosmetics.
Read more on Diamond website
Image: Photo from the launch of Project M