Enamel consists of more than 95% by weight of apatite (carbonated), a calcium phosphate mineral found in all mineralized vertebrate tissues (. Apatite crystals grow predominantly along their c-axis, thus showing elongated shapes. Enamel is the hardest substance in the human body and contains the highest percentage of minerals (96%), and water and organic material make up the rest. The main mineral is hydroxyapatite, which is a crystalline calcium phosphate.
Enamel forms in the tooth, while the tooth develops inside the jaw before it erupts in the mouth. Once fully formed, enamel contains no blood vessels or nerves and is not made up of cells. Remineralizing the teeth can repair damage to the tooth to some extent, but the body cannot repair subsequent damage. The maintenance and repair of human tooth enamel is a major concern in dentistry.
Enamel is the tough, hard layer that covers the outer surface of your teeth. It's made mostly of a calcium phosphate mineral called hydroxyapatite.
It's a chemical that makes teeth strong, and that has been around for eons. But it's a complex substance, and UCSF scientists are exploring its mysteries.
Calcium
Tooth enamel is primarily made of bundles of thin crystals of a calcium phosphate-based mineral known as apatite. It is also composed of a protein that acts as a scaffold to direct the apatite into specific shapes in each bundle.
The calcium phosphate mineral found in tooth enamel is the hardest in the human body, making it very difficult to chip or break teeth. It is also a vital part of the body's system for circulating blood and carrying messages to other parts of the body.
It is a major component of the body's bone tissue, making bones strong and dense. It also plays a crucial role in many other systems, including the health and functioning of nerves and muscles.
Phosphorus
Phosphorus is a mineral that forms the enamel of teeth and helps your body absorb calcium. It is essential for bone health, and deficiency can cause tooth decay and problems with jawbones.
A multivalent, nonmetal of the nitrogen group with the atomic number 15, phosphorus is a heavy metal that emits a faint glow when it bonds with oxygen and forms compounds (called P5+ valence). This element is commonly found in phosphate rocks and is an essential part of living organisms.
Alchemist Hennig Brand discovered phosphorus in 1669 when he tried to distill salts by evaporating urine. The vapor that emerged was white and glowed in the dark, which Brand dubbed “phosphorescence.”
Fluoride
Fluoride is a naturally occurring mineral that strengthens enamel. It's present in water, soil, plants, rocks, and even the air.
Dentists use fluoride to make the enamel of teeth stronger and more resistant to tooth decay. It's also added in small amounts to public water supplies in the United States and many other countries.
Fluoride protects against tooth decay by helping the enamel of teeth to resist acid from plaque bacteria and sugar in the mouth. It also helps prevent the loss of minerals from enamel (demineralization).
Carbonate
The carbonate ions (CO2-3) that replace the hydroxyl and phosphate ions of biogenic apatite play an important role in tooth enamel mineralization. In addition, they contribute to the buffering capacity of saliva, which prevents pH changes induced by acidic plaque challenge.
Tooth enamel is a highly mineralized tissue that consists of bundles of thin crystals of the calcium phosphate-based mineral known as apatite. A protein called amelogenin helps direct these crystals into specific shapes.
However, the exact mechanism of how this complex structure forms remains unknown. Scientists are using state-of-the-art electron scanning, atomic force and optical microscopes to try to gain a better understanding of how enamel develops.
To perform these studies, horizontal sections of teeth were cut under water cooling and the enamel and dentin surface were marked with perpendicular 0.5 mm-deep notches made by a low-speed diamond disc. These were used to delimit control and treatment regions for all specimens.
Tooth enamel is harder than any other substance in the human body, including bone. Enamel is mainly composed of thin crystal bundles of a calcium phosphate-based mineral known as apatite. However, a protein called amelogenin plays a key role in giving structure to enamel. Amelogenin acts as a scaffold, helping to direct apatite crystals to specific shapes in each bundle.
Tooth enamel forms at specific times in childhood and contains 0.4% carbon. Tooth decay is the most common dental health problem caused by the interaction of bacteria in tooth enamel, resulting in the imbalance between demineralization and remineralization. Early diagnosis of dental caries is essential for subsequent preventive treatments. Traditionally, visual and tactile inspection methods tend to lack sensitivity to detect the scenario of early tooth decay.
Other techniques, such as fiber-optic transillumination or quantitative light-induced fluorescence approaches, have a high incidence of rapid false positives or negatives for diagnosing dental caries early. A New Quantitative Diagnostic Approach Is Needed. For the first time he addressed this problem with HSR microscopy, since the tooth has abundant phosphate groups (Raman peak at 959 cm-). Clearly, we can see four different anatomical areas of enamel decay: the surface area, the body of the lesion, the translucent zone and the sound enamel.
As the direction of polarization of one beam rotates against another (the angle is θ), the intensities of SRS at 959 cm− 1 gradually decrease from 0 to 90 degrees and increase from 90 to 180 degrees. Specifically, the sound enamel and the surface area are more sensitive to θ, while the body of the lesion remains less sensitive. By dividing the SRS signal at θ %3D 90 degrees by the SRS signal polarized at θ %3D 0 degrees, the depolarization ratio can be derived. In addition, these depolarization ratio patterns offer an innovative way to resolve and map areas of tooth enamel decay with micrometer resolution.
Therefore, polarization-sensitive SRS microscopy could potentially be used as a diagnostic criterion for the quantitative analysis of dental caries in the field of dentistry. There's no doubt that lime juice has many health benefits; however, it can have a number of side effects that can cause health risks, such as tooth enamel decay and stomach ulcers. Gastroesophageal reflux disorder is a digestive disorder caused by limes or acidic foods. The vitamin C in lime juice, also called ascorbic acid, affects iron absorption in the body.
Lime juice contains sulfites that can cause reactions and allergies in some people. Although lime juice helps treat kidney stones and is good for kidney health, people with kidney disease should not consume lime juice, as it could cause kidney damage. Citrus fruits generally contain high levels of potassium. This could be bad for those with kidney disease.
Sick kidneys could not maintain electrolyte balance. This leads to abnormal levels of potassium, sodium and phosphorus. The main dietary change that all human beings undergo early in life is the transition from breastfeeding to solid foods, and the timing of this weaning has important demographic connotations. Because infants have a trophic level above their mothers, a decrease in the Δ15N values of infants is observed when breast milk is replaced by solid food, in parallel with a change in Δ18O related to the replacement of water derived from breast milk by surface water.
A study of teeth from the Guatemalan site of Kaminaljuyú, dating from 700 BC. C. As of 1500 AD, it showed that solid foods were introduced before 2 years of age, but breast milk was an important source of water for at least another year. Paleodietary reconstruction usually focuses on humans, but in certain situations, the study of animal remains can provide information on human activities, such as herd management and transhumance.
Studies on carbon, oxygen and strontium isotopes in sheep teeth from the late Stone Age of Kasteelberg, in southern Africa, indicate that there was little seasonal movement of animals from the coast to the interior, suggesting that the transhumance practiced in that region by the historic Khoekhoe peoples only developed later In prehistoric times, when cattle herding began. Thermodynamically more stable apatites form slowly from precursors that precipitate more easily, so the model that includes apatites is called the long-term model, while the other one without PAH and FAP is called the short-term model. The first can be considered as an equilibrium model of the system, while kinetic factors inhibit the direct formation of apatites in the second. Computer modeling calculations suggest that CP and TCP are the most likely precursors to PAH.
Polymers form an integral part of our existence and of everything that surrounds us, from the basic components of life that constitute proteins, nucleic acids and polysaccharides, to commercial products obtained in the automotive, construction and transportation industries, plastic toys and tools, reading glasses, etc. Most of these materials are comprised of a combination of one or more materials to form polymeric compounds. Polymeric compounds of natural origin, such as bone (a combination of ceramic crystals of calcium phosphate and collagen fibers can form dense and strong cortical bone or spongy and cut-resistant bone), teeth (tooth enamel, dentin and cement), all of which contain different percentages of crystals of inorganic hydroxyapatite and organic material (such as collagen or non-collagen proteins) and wood (a combination of cellulose and lignin) have a unique combination of material properties and a wide spectrum of applications that components alone cannot offer. At the beginning of the 20th century, plastic compounds developed by mixing resin and filling material (wood flour, mica or glass) with greater strength and stability marked the beginning of synthetic polymer composites.
The first investigations used conductive fillers such as carbon black, graphite fibers, metal-coated fiberglass, metal particles or metal flakes for the preparation of composite materials (Bhattacharya, 198. Therefore, a new class of materials called conductive polymer composites (CPC) emerged, which opened up new and interesting applications in several fields, including bioelectronics. CPCs typically consist of a combination of one or more non-conductive polymers and conductive fillers distributed throughout the polymer matrix. The conductivity of CPCs is governed by the percolation theory, which describes the conductive phase of the CPC formed by a network of filling materials with a certain percentage of weight. For filler loads below a certain concentration, the filler particles no longer maintain physical contact with each other to provide a continuous path for electron transport necessary for conduction and, subsequently, the CPC has a sudden drop in conductivity (percolation threshold).
Some of the drawbacks of CPCs include a high dependence on processing conditions, mechanical instability, and an isolated surface layer on the conductive material (Freund and Deore, 200). Chewing cheese immediately after rinsing with sucrose resulted in a 71% reduction in the demineralization of the enamel plates, raised the pH of the plate, but did not cause any significant change in the microflora of the plate compared to the controls. This allowed the team to identify the best conditions for observing tiny calcium phosphate particles, called nuclei, that are formed from protein ions. At the edges of the teeth, where there is no dentin underlying the enamel, the color sometimes has a slightly blue or whitish translucent shade, easily observable in the upper incisors.
As mentioned above, enamel is deposited by ameloblasts through a process of secreting an enamel matrix, which is then calcified. Even during the early demineralization process, this “surface zone” remains intact, probably through a process of continuous remineralization by inorganic ions released by the inner layers of the enamel as it dissolves. The MPC-Ran-2-methacryloyloxyethylphosphate (PMP) copolymer synthesized with zwitterionic ion and Ca2+ binding residues formed a highly effective biofilm inhibitory surface on HA on the dental surface. A simplified formula for the dental mineral composition is Ca10 — xNaN (PO 6) — y (CO) z (OH), 2 — UFu, which is different from stoichiometric hydroxyapatite with the formula Ca10 (PO 6 (OH), 2.For the most part, research has shown that tooth enamel formation in animals is almost identical to formation in humans.
Longitudinal section across the molar cusp, showing increments “buried” above the cusp and, on the right and left, striations that reach the surface of the lateral enamel. Primary tooth enamel has a more opaque crystalline shape and therefore appears whiter than on permanent teeth. The carbonate fraction of bone and dental minerals can also be analyzed, and although it is prone to contamination in the case of bone, it is very resistant to bone in the case of tooth enamel. However, enamel is never a pure substance and always includes other inorganic or organic components during the development stage.
This is of considerable interest in dentistry, since this change produces enamel that has a much greater resistance to acid dissolution. Therefore, enamel will remain vulnerable to abrasive forces, such as tooth brushing, even hours after softening. . .
