Sea Urchin Mineralized Tissue

摘要

Sea urchin ossicles are structural analogs of mammalian bones and serve as a model biomineral system. Sea urchins employ as wide a range of composite reinforcement strategies as are seen in engineering composites, and, studied as materials, teeth (and other ossicles) from different echinoid families illustrate combinations of reinforcement parameters and toughening mechanisms providing good functionality. Studying ossicles from different sea urchin families, therefore, is one method of probing the composite design space available to sea urchins, and this offers important guidance for engineering of structural tissue. This report is part of a larger multi-mode x-ray investigation employing microCT, both synchrotron and laboratory sources, phase contrast radiography and transmission microbeam diffraction mapping; voxels (volume elements) approaching 1 μm~3 can be interrogated noninvasively in millimeter sized samples. Only microCT results are presented below; these focus on sea urchin lanterns (jaw structure) and spines of a variety of sea urchin types and serve to illustrate how this sort of integrated approach might be applied to bone.