How to grow the hardest teeth in the sea

• Autores: Alyssa Botelho
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 2937, 2013, pág. 11
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Despite their diet of algae, chiton mollusks have the hardest teeth known--and a new atom-probe study is helping people figure out how they grow. The chiton's black, metallic teeth are made of magnetite, an iron oxide used in electronics and medical devices. Over five years, Lyle Gordon at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and colleagues have used an atom probe to study the teeth of a fingernail-sized chiton mollusk. They found that in the watery gel at a tooth's center, proteins and sugars criss-cross to form a scaffold that binds positively charged ions such as magnesium and sodium. Those ions, Gordon suspects, then bind negatively charged proteins that collect iron, providing a complex template for the growing tooth's shell.