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Cracking the secret of enamel

Projects:
IGERT: Dynamics of behavioral shifts in human evolution:...
Institution:
George Washington University
Primary Strategic Goal:
Discovery: Foster research that will advance the frontiers of knowledge, emphasizing areas of greatest opportunity and potential benefit and establishing the Nation as a global leader in fundamental transformational science and engineering.
Secondary Strategic Goal:
Learning: Build the Nation's research capability through critical investments in advanced instrumentation, facilities, cyber infrastructure, and experimental tools.

Achievement/Results

Constantino, Lucas, and colleagues from Israel and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) discovered a functional role for the presence of small microstructural crack-like defects, called tufts, at the base of human tooth enamel. This study combined experimental fracture mechanics with finite element modeling to show that tufts absorb much of the load during biting and chewing, and their sheer numbers keep any one tuft from extending to the outer tooth surface, thus containing the damage within the tooth. Enamel tufts were long thought to be developmental defects with no functional importance, but this research showed that they play a critical role in protecting teeth from catastrophic failure. This study is one part of a multi-year collaboration between CASHP and NIST and was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2009, Vol. 106: 7289-7293).

Address Goals

The identification of a functional role for tufts was a genuinely new discovery, and the wide publicity it received online meant that it reached a wide national and international audience.

Posted By:
Bernard Wood
Posted:
November 28, 2010