New Material Enhances and Restores Hardness of Original Tooth Enamel

Sep, 2022 - By WMR

Researchers have created a synthetic dental coating that imitates the structure of natural enamel with additional strength

Enamel is known to be the hardest tissue in the human body, as this material is hard to copy for engineers. However, if mimicked, it would offer huge advancement in regenerative medicine and material science. Now a group of scientists at Ural Federal University in a joint research have created a new synthetic dental coating by making some tweaks in the composition of a mineral that is found naturally, for emulating the microstructure of regular enamel into a novel dental coating and this technique gives even more strength to the enamel.

This new dental coating is made from hydroxyapatite as a base. Hydroxyapatite is primarily found in bone and mineralized tissues in animals and humans. The team of scientists doped this compound with an amino acids complex, which naturally helps in repairing of muscle and bone structures such as arginine and lysine. These result from a mineralized layer having similar properties of the key component of natural enamel. Furthermore, the researchers applied this material to healthy teeth and observed its capability of binding the real dental tissues. Then, with the use of field emission electron, chemical imaging and atomic force microscopy the researchers investigated new material properties. The team found the mineralized layer to be 300-500 nanometers thick having a structure of nanocrystal with the apatite crystals in natural enamel.

Moreover, the researchers also found that this novel coating shows significant strength and more hardness compared to normal enamel. To fend off decay and cavity, both very fine and very tough tooth coating are important, and this is the only tissue in human body that does not regenerates, which could cause severe dental issues further in life. With this new development, restoring enamel could become possible. The team is now focusing on further development of this new tooth coating.