Figure - PMC

Skip to main content

An official website of the United States government

Here's how you know

Here's how you know

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

View full-text article in PMC

. 2023 Oct 10;13:17146. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-44256-7

Search in PMC
Search in PubMed
View in NLM Catalog
Add to search

© The Author(s) 2023

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

PMC Copyright notice

(a) sketch of a water drop on a kaolinite surface (top) demonstrating the preferential flat orientation of the particles on the glue surface with the magnification (bottom) showing the interaction between water molecules and the basal planes, (b) interaction between a flat kaolinite particle and a planar cell surface with the magnification (c) which illustrates how the basal plane with low atomic packing and edge plane with high atomic packing contact the cell surface, (d) same as (a) for montmorillonite, (e) interaction between a porous domain of a montmorillonite particle and a planar cell surface with the magnification (f) showing the basal/edge stacking units that get in contact with the cell surface. The crystal pattern is made by Avogadro free software (version 2.0) and it is general for clay minerals. The overlapping basal/edge stacking units of montmorillonite are pure imagination based on our AFM results and the literature^10,27.