Analysis of a general principle of crystal nucleation, formation in the different hard tissues

Institut fur Medizinische Physik und Biophysik, Universitat Munster, Germany.

We have found, at high EM magnification, on ultrathin sections of shock-frozen, freeze-dried, embedded pieces of the developing hard tissues, that the primary crystallites consist of strands composed of nanometer-sized apatitic islands, which rapidly coalesce to needles and afterward to platelets. By small-area electron diffraction, with energy-filtered electrons, it was clarified that these strands are already crystallographically oriented along the bipolar c-axis so that the center-to-center distances between the islands would reflect the distances between crystal-nucleating sites along the matrix. The EM analysis of the cross-cut stained unmineralized and of the unstained mineralized collagen fibers of turkey tibia tendon shows that the staining "nuclei" and the early crystallites, appearing as dark dots, surround "light" round structures, which we interpret as the collagen microfibrils, surrounded by the apatitic crystallites.