Preparation of organothiol self-assembled monolayers for use in templated crystallization

Organothiol self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) have garnered much interest as templates for oriented crystallization of biominerals. While, on the surface, SAM preparation appears to be straightforward, there are many subtleties that may yield films that lack the desired effect on the mineral component in subsequent use for templated mineralization. Herein, we discuss literature that uses organothiol SAMs to understand various principles in biomineralization, to motivate the following discussion of preparation procedures and pitfalls that may arise while working with SAMs. We provide a range of parameters for each element of a SAM-forming process, which have been shown in the literature to produce monolayers suitable for mineralization experiments, and close with a step-by-step procedure, based on findings in the cited literature, that yields functional SAMs with very high fidelity.