Correspondence Comment on “Avoidance of Aluminum Toxicity in Freshwater Snails Involves Intracellular SiliconsAluminum Biointeraction” While we were not the first to coin the term hydroxyaluminosilicate (HAS), we were the first to demonstrate that the formation of HAS limited the biological availability of aluminum (1). We have since strived to understand as much as we can about the inorganic chemistry of HAS and their role in the biogeochemical cycle of aluminum (2, 3) and through our efforts we have provided a full description of one of the very few examples of the chemistry of silicic acid (4). The latter, in undersaturated solutions (
