Engineering Commons^™

Self-Assembly Directs Enamel Formation And Regeneration, Malcolm Snead

Composites at Lake Louise (CALL 2015)

Enamel is a unique bioceramic tissue covering our teeth, which by improving feeding and nutrition fueled an explosion in vertebrate evolution. Enamel is also the tissue affected by the most prevalent infectious disease of humankind, caries. While enamel is the hardest tissue in the vertebrate body it develops as a soft extracellular protein matrix precursor synthesized by ameloblast cells that is composed mainly of the proteins amelogenin and ameloblastin. Amelogenins are small-, hydrophobic-, inherently disordered proteins that self-assembly to form nanospheres through the interaction of two domains located at opposite molecular ends, whereas, ameloblastin self-assembles through but a single N’-terminal …