Thegrindingtipoftheseaurchintoothexhibitsexquisite.PDFVIP

The grinding tip of the sea urchin tooth exhibits exquisite control over calcite crystal orientation and Mg distribution a,1 b b b c d a Yurong Ma , Barbara Aichmayer , Oskar Paris , Peter Fratzl , Anders Meibom , Rebecca A. Metzler , Yael Politi , Lia Addadia,2, P. U. P. A. Gilbertd,2,3, and Steve Weinera,2 aDepartment of Structural Biology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel; bDepartment of Biomaterials, Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, 14424 Potsdam, Germany; cLaboratoire d’Etudes de la Matie´re Extraterrestre, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique NanoAnalyses 2679, Muse´um National D’Histoire Naturelle, 75005 Paris, France; and dDepartment of Physics, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706 Edited by Jack Halpern, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, and approved February 20, 2009 (received for review October 13, 2008) The sea urchin tooth is a remarkable grinding tool. Even though the advantage of 3 highly resolving techniques that provide infor- tooth is composed almost entirely of calcite, it is used to grind holes mation on compositional variations and crystal orientations. into a rocky substrate itself often composed of calcite. Here, we use During tooth formation, a needle-plate complex forms a single 3 complementary high-resolution tools to probe aspects of the crystal via an amorphous calcium carbonate (ACC) precursor structure of the grinding tip: X-ray photoelectron emission spec- phase (10). The needle-plate complexes have been described as tromicroscopy (X-PEEM), X-ray microdiffraction, and NanoSIMS. being all aligned such that a whole tooth behaves as a single We confirm that the needles and plates are aligned an