Bone Biomineral Properties Vary across Human Osteonal Bone

ACS nano 13(11), 12949 - 12956 (2019). doi:10.1021/acsnano.9b05535
The biomineralization of bone remains apuzzle. During Haversian remodeling in the dense humancortical bone, osteoclasts excavate a tunnel that is then filledin by osteoblasts with layers of bone of varying fibrilorientations, resulting in a lamellar motif. Such bonerepresents an excellent possibility to increase our understandingof bone as a material as well as bonebiomineralization by studying spatio/temporal variations inthe biomineral across an osteon. To this end, fluorescencecomputed tomography and diffraction scattering computedtomography with sub-micrometer resolution is applied toobtain position resolved fluorescence spectra and diffractionpatterns in a 3D volume. The microstructural properties ofthe apatite biomineral are not homogeneous but depend critically on the time point at which it was laid down. Thisindicates that the nature of bone biomineral is highly dependent on the microenvironment during bone formation andremodeling.
Published by Soc., Washington, DC