Organic-inorganic interfaces in vertebrate mineralized tissues occur at many hierarchical levels, not only in the context of normal bone and tooth physiology, but also in bone wound healing and during implant osseointegration. In normal vertebrate biology, at the atomic and molecular levels, amino acid side groups, peptides and proteins recognize specific crystallographic faces of mineral (calcium phosphate [apatite] in bones and teeth, and calcium carbonate [calcite] in inner ear otoconia) and dock onto calcium-rich lattice planes to regulate crystal growth and thus extracellular matrix mineralization. Many of these same events also occur when soft tissues calcify pathologically (e.g. vascular calcification, kidney stones), where similar molecular determinants regulating mineralization are involved. Moreover, enzymatic processing of mineralization-regulating molecules is known to modulate their activity. At higher hierarchical levels, protein recognition and assembly events at mineralized tissue surfaces define important steps i) in bone remodeling at interfacial cement lines/planes, ii) at osseointegrated implant interfaces, and iii) at wound margins during bone repair, which even occurs at an intermediate scale where small bone particles (from surgical drilling/cutting debris) are cleared by macrophages via phagocytosis. This seminar will integrate research findings across these normal and surgical/repair settings, focusing on cross-cutting findings in the different systems that shed light on common processes occurring at organic-inorganic interfaces.