A team of MIT researchers led by civil engineer and materials scientist Markus Buehler has finally unraveled the structure of bone—a long-standing mystery—with almost atom-by-atom precision. Doing so took many years of analysis by some of the world’s most powerful computers, results that were confirmed by laboratory experiments.
Buehler says the biggest question was how two different materials—a soft, flexible biomolecule called collagen and a hard, brittle form of the mineral apatite—combine to form something that is simultaneously hard, tough, and slightly flexible.
The constituents are so different that “you can’t take these two materials individually and understand how bone behaves,” Buehler says. Hydroxyapatite is like chalk, he says: “It’s very brittle. If you try to bend it even a little, it breaks into pieces.” Collagen, on the other hand, is what gelatin is made of—the very epitome of a wobbly substance.
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