Edited by:

Lucian Staicu, University of Warsaw, Poland
Juan Liu, Peking University, Beijing, China
Julie Cosmidis, University of Oxford, UK
Jonathan Lloyd, The University of Manchester, UK

Deadline for submissions
30 June 2024

Microbial biomineralization is attracting the interest of both fundamental- and applied-oriented researchers due to its great potential. While some biominerals produced by microorganisms have a well-understood biological function (e.g. magnetosomes, polyphosphates, S⁰), other biominerals including Fe minerals, Se⁰ or carbonates remain poorly understood from an evolutionary perspective. Increased attention, however, keeps unrevealing the complex relation of microorganisms with biominerals in natural and anthropogenic settings. From an applied point of view, biominerals may contribute to the recovery of critical resources from waste streams by using high-affinity and high-selectivity microbial enzymatic systems. This approach may overcome the current limits of the physical-chemical technologies. A growing number of studies attempts to contribute to accelerating the transition from the obsolete linear economy model to a circular one focused on the recovery of energy and materials from the production cycles.

The main goal of this collection is to focus on the fundamental and applied progress in microbial biomineralization, inviting contributions based on multidisciplinary studies and covering different research aspects such as:

• Biominerals resulting from microbial respiratory and detoxification processes;
• The importance of microbial biomineralization in the context of environmental depollution;
• The recovery of high value biominerals from secondary/waste resources such as industrial streams;
• The role and mechanisms of biomineralization on natural biogeochemical cycles;
• Biomineralization-inspired methods for medical applications, e.g. natural or synthetic bone mimetic materials or nanovaccine biomineralization
  

Authors wishing to submit to this collection should do so through the Geo-Bio Interfaces submission and peer review system and should select the option to submit to a collection, then choose 'Collection: Microbial Biomineralization' from the drop-down menu.

Papers may be submitted at any time before the submission deadline. Accepted articles will be published on this collection page continuously as and when they complete production.