At Last: New Synthetic Tooth Enamel Is Harder and Stronger Than the Real Thing

Tooth Enamel Illustration

Delivering what has been so challenging to produce, researchers present an engineered analog of tooth enamel – an ideal model for designing biomimetic materials – designed to closely mimic the composition and structure of biological teeth’s hard mineralized outer layer. It demonstrates exceptional mechanical properties, they say.

Natural tooth enamel – the thin outer layer of our teeth – is the hardest biological material in the human body. It is renowned for its high stiffness, hardness, viscoelasticity, strength, and toughness and exhibits exceptional damage resistance, despite being only several millimeters thick.

Tooth enamel’s unusual combination of properties is a product of its hierarchical architecture – a complex structure made up of mostly hydroxyapatite nanowires interconnected by an amorphous intergranular phase (AIP) consisting of magnesium-substituted amorphous calcium phosphate. However, accurately replicating this type of hierarchical organization in a scalable abiotic composite has remained a challenge.

Here, Hewei Zhao and colleagues present an engineered enamel that contains the essential hierarchical structure at multiple scales. The artificial tooth enamel (ATE) was produced using AIP-coated hydroxyapatite nanowires, which were aligned using dual-directional freezing in the presence of polyvinyl alcohol. According to the authors, this allowed the engineered structures to have an atomic, nanoscale, and microscale organization like natural enamel.

In a series of tests, Zhao et al. demonstrated that the ATE nanocomposite simultaneously exhibited high stiffness, hardness, strength, viscoelasticity, and toughness, exceeding both the properties of enamel and previously manufactured materials. 

Reference: “Multiscale engineered artificial tooth enamel” by Hewei Zhao, Shaojia Liu, Yan Wei, Yonghai Yue, Mingrui Gao, Yangbei Li, Xiaolong Zeng, Xuliang Deng, Nicholas A. Kotov, Lin Guo and Lei Jiang, 3 February 2022, Science.
DOI: 10.1126/science.abj3343

43 Comments on "At Last: New Synthetic Tooth Enamel Is Harder and Stronger Than the Real Thing"

  1. People who lie about weight are scandalous, but always be truthful and honest about health or weight with friends or family. People who lie about are evil.

  2. People who lie about weight are scandalous, always be truthful and honest about health or weight with anyone. People who lie about that are evil.

  3. Don’t lie about health or weight that is just evil.

  4. Do they have this in Chicago, and how much?

  5. Frederick Rainert | February 8, 2022 at 5:38 am | Reply

    Can we use it with in 10 years ? I have no tooth in my mouth.
    Post sponsor :
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  6. Rea, I feel exactly like you! I am 245 years old and weigh 8 pounds, and NO ONE BELIEVES ME! It is so frustrating.

  7. Does walmart carry this yet and can it be done in less than 1 hour?

  8. Doesn’t sound like they intend to use it to help everyone fix their teeth smh

  9. Dustin Wayne Butler | February 13, 2022 at 9:34 am | Reply

    Now, for full teeth with roots implanted and all

  10. I believe in you JESUS H CHRIST. 245 YEARS IT IS

  11. Rea,Rea! Deep breath in. Now exhale slowly. Once again, deep breath in and exhale slowly. Repeat until the drama passes. Hope this helps!

  12. Lots chinese hocus pocus bs. I’m a dentist and know this is hooey.

  13. Rae….HELLLO…what are you talking about…drop to your knees and PRAY

  14. Friedrich Feuerstein | February 15, 2022 at 2:34 pm | Reply

    That’s right, and once this passes all the trials and is approved for use in humans, it’ll only cost a mere $9000 per tooth. Am I right?

  15. Rea – who did lie to again. You are not evil.
    They need to test this on rats first. Make sure they have healthy teeth especially in Chicagos rats population prior to making it available to humans.

  16. Rea, whatever gave you the idea you’re entitled to anyone’s personal information? Are you a bot?

  17. These comments are a insightful…..

  18. Unbelievable breakthrough I still got 12 teeth in the Bottom and none on the top help me please

  19. Rea sounds like the average angry f@t chick lol. Good health & weight are a lifestyle choice so if you choose to be overweight you are the only one to be angry with. Btw was this article about being fat or teeth…?

  20. Would it be possible to get a transparent version and apply it to glasses?

  21. Thompson’s Teeth: the only teeth strong enough to eat other teeth.

  22. These comments are comical! Half of which have absolutely nothing to do with the topic! LOL. Personally, I’m curious as to the next step. What happens now, and does anyone have a timeline or guesstimate as to whether or not the this stuff will even get close to human trials?

  23. Rea:
    best put down the bottle, STAT!

  24. Link, oh my yes, wouldn’t that be fantastic.

  25. Pimpin since been pimpin since been pimpin !

  26. I write this as an engineer that studied biomaterials under the late Samuel F Gilbert PhD at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.

    One of the principles of biomaterials is the interface of the implant. In this case it touches natural bone.

    What is the difference of Elastic Modulus between the artificial and natural bone at the interface? If the synthetic material has a mismatch in modulus, the patient has a high chance of losing the natural supporting bone and related. Also how does the immune system react to it? Is it compatible with blood and tissue? If no, then we have more issues, not to mention a weakened tooth structure. Remember safety and interactions are key.

    • You see? Perfect example of never being able to bring anything innovative original to the table…hey myopic aryan, there were German scientists and mathematicians in the 1800’s that in casual passing, have far surpassed anything that will ever come out of your corner of the world. If what I said was even remotely false, what in terms of innovation and technology do you have to show for yourselves? What is the elastic modulus toot toot…like do you expect the video to start talking to you or something?

      Can you tell me what the article even says because I know what it says…. Here I’ll tell you because I’m not going to sit around waiting for your haptic reply.

      It says:

      “not“ + thing² = (?²) + ” – not” ….see where the problem is?

      EXACTLY…of course you don’t.

      If they lol “Gilbert’feingold” is passing down elastic synergies that cannot be seen, then it truly is a dead-end road.

      Lmfao ….a engineer…lol 😆

      Has anyone noticed how is time goes on things typically get better but these phones along with its features that certainly do not surpass my original iPhone 4 because the voice text programs can’t even pick out basic English anymore and gee, I would just love to take these three pieces of s*** phones that I have and let a Hindu Indian speak into it and I estimated wouldn’t take really more than a thousand word essay to prove my point. I’m not holding my breath per se but for the life of me I wouldn’t be surprised that they have far less grammatical errors than I do and I’m a white man and I obviously can speak English and the problem being one of endless many is something I already know in which people are really complaining about it where I say it’s been high time for the past 20-plus years that you’re complaint form should be a Colt 45 and just start shooting until you see no more brown and then change the color MO to the swarthy and Schwartzy 💥💥💥☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️👀👣👣👣💥💥💥💥💥🙀💥💥💥💥💩💩💥💥

  27. Great , now onto Meth teeth or lack thereof

  28. I just use hard candy to replace my enamel. It seems to work for an hour.

  29. I have a front tootbat that chips all the time so once a year or so I have to have it fixed and it’s like over 500 .00 eac time . I wish they could come up with something that didn’t break that would be awesome . Also I think it should be covered on insurance

  30. Well the dentist stated it was “hooey”…. not sure why, he didn’t elaborate. However being the most relevant & one of most intelligent comments on here(besides mine of course),you damn near gotta go with him/her/it.🥸

  31. Soundsike an Asian scientist bringing wealth of knowledge to this country, yet will be looked down upon by illiterate Backcountry conservative folks, little do they realize how good immigrants are

  32. The pico proportionate measures associated with the energies of the particular protonic forces which bind in a magnetic moment of a certain strength in accord with the purposed calculation of electromatic activity. Nice job, but remember, you cannot use nano technology to measure nuclear activity as there is not one nanometer in an atom of helium or any other atomic element as 31 picometers is the radius of an atom if helium. Perhaps then the calculation of proportionate activity of electromagnetic energy reducing the structure in relation to the elemental size will be sufficient for the estimation of the purposed structure. For instance the pitch on the inside ie the radio frequency and the pitch on the outside the gamma frequency.

  33. We’ll Rea seems to be a bit of a judgmental bitch. Lol oh the joy of freedom of speech lmao

  34. Go to thetruthvideos on Facebook type it in search

  35. The dentist said it’s “hooey” because he knows dentists are only smart enough to not threaten their own job security with repeat customers. Besides, it’s irrelevant anyway since people blessed with good teeth/enamel wouldn’t need this and the rest of us only have a few teeth left and they’re all $3000 crowns that require no additional enamel protection. Dentists, chiropractors, mechanics, psychologists…. if they’re any good, you’d only need to see em once or twice and their business would starve. Could’ve owned a few houses with all the money dentists have taken and nothing to show for it, including a smile. Cell phone manufacturers might be interested in this protective coating tho!!

  36. Go to Pubmed and look at any science article. Most science on any topic, being done in the USA or elsewhere, has Asian authors. Some countries seem to value scientists as much as we Americans value athletes and movie starts.

  37. @ Rea
    Can confirm, jesus is over 200 years old and has a whoppin 8 pound william

  38. This will never be made available thru your dentist.lol
    Will cost too much to produce.

  39. I have to poo.

  40. You actually want it to have the same strength or the tooth will be more likely to crack when it’s under stress.

  41. Oh-oh….if it’s coming from China better vet its toxicity! Don’t trust their standards. Er, do they have any???

  42. AWESOME !! see it to believe 😀

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