INTRODUCTION The aesthetic control over structures and properties of biominerals produced in nature inspired chemists, biologists and materials scientists since a long time 1-3 . Mimicking the design and synthesis of biominerals by living organisms is the current challenge for scientists 4-10 .Calcium carbonate is among the most studied biominerals because of its high abundance and ubiquity in nature. It is well established now that in case of calcium carbonate biominerals, templates with carboxylate groups are likely to direct structure through carboxylate moieties occupying carbonate sites during crystal growth and thereby directing the structure to produce the desired shape and functionality 11,13 . Our previous works have shown that by varying the concentration, ORIENTAL JOURNAL OF CHEMISTRY www.orientjchem.org An International Open Free Access, Peer Reviewed Research Journal ISSN: 0970-020 X CODEN: OJCHEG 2013, Vol. 29, No. (4): Pg. 1559-1563 Combined Influence of Organic Additives on Growth Morphology of Calcium Carbonate BALAKRISHNA KURRA and SARATCHANDRA BABU MUKKAMALA* Department of Chemistry, GITAM University, Visakhapatnam - 530 045, A.P., India. *Corresponding author E-mail: mscbabu@yahoo.com http://dx.doi.org/10.13005/ojc/290437 (Received: September 10, 2013; Accepted: November 19, 2013) ABSTRACT The infuence of organic additives, β-cyclodextrin, HEDTA, L-aspartic acid and L-glutamic acid on crystal growth of calcium carbonate via vapour diffusion method has been investigated. In the absence of additive, regular rhombohedral calcium carbonate crystal habit resulted. Whereas in presence of additive, calcite with truncated, aggregated rhombohedral sub crystals and elongated hexagonal morphologies resulted. The obtained calcium carbonate phases were characterized by SEM, Powder XRD and FT-IR. Key words: Biomineralisation, Calcium carbonate, β-cyclodextrin, HEDTA, L-glutamic acid, L-aspartic acid. it is possible to synthesize different polymorphs of calcium carbonate using dicarboxylic acids such as malonic acid, succinic acid etc as templating agents 13-14 . Another polycarboxylate was employed to synthesize calcite-micro trumpets 14-16 which closely mimic the coccoliths of an unicellular algae, Discosphaera tubifera. In nature, living organisms use a organic matrix containing mixed functionalities for controlling the growth, size and morphology of biominerals. Hence we have attempted to investigate the infuence of mixed additives such as β-cyclodextrin (β-CD), N-(2-hydroxyethyl) ethylene diamine-N,N’,N’-triaceticacid (HEDTA), L-aspartic acid (L-ASP) and L-glutamic acid (L-GLU) (Scheme 1) on growth morphology of calcium carbonate and reported in this paper.