Novel High Resolution Measurement of Bone Mineralite Size and Shape

Extract

Study of the microscopic structure of bone dates back to the earliest use of the optical microscope. Understanding the complexities of the structure of this material has roughly paralleled advances in microscopic technique. Relatively recently a new powerful microscopic technique, atomic force microscopy (AFM), has been invented. So it should not be surprising to expect a new step in our understanding of bone. There have been several recent publications applying AFM to bone and its constituents. None of these studies have examined the shape of naturally occurring mineralites in bone. The issue we addsgss in this work is the elucidation of the three dimensional structure of the apatite mineralites in bone. Chiefly, two methods have been used previously to ascertain this structure: transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD,). The major difficulty with TEM is that it is a projection technique. Each image only yields information about geometry in a single plane. Landis et al. showed how to circumvent this problem using tomographic TEM. AFM provides a corroborative and perhaps more gentle method of directly measuring the structure of very small bone mineralites. It is possible that the interaction energy of the electron beam with very small mineralites is sufficient to vaporize them. The problem with XRD is that the line broadening used can have contributions from sources not directly related to mineralite size. In particular, if a single mineralite contains more than one crystalline domain, then the line broadening yields a measure of the domain size, not the overall mineralite size.