| Tooth enamel is one of the hardest materials found in the animal kingdom. Accordingly, understanding its unique characteristics is of special interest for the interpretation of distinct tooth physical properties and for the development of new synthetic materials. Enamel is a composite material that comprises an inorganic matrix composed of hierarchically organized carbonated hydroxyapatite (HA) crystals, and an organic matrix mainly composed of the protein amelogenin. This study was designed to investigate how variations in enamel ultrastructure and chemical composition (organic and inorganic) may affect tooth mechanical and optical properties.;One hundred extracted sound teeth were collected from adult patients attending McGill Undergraduate Dental Clinic. Vickers microindentation, Shade spectrophotometry, FTIR, SEM-EDS and XRD were used to assess enamel microhardness, tooth shade (registered in universal shade parameters: lightness, chroma and hue), chemical composition and crystallography (i.e. crystal size, lattice parameters of the crystal; a-axis and c-axis). The data obtained was analyzed for correlation, and statistical significance was set at P <0.05.;Tooth enamel crystallographic structure, chemical composition, optical and mechanical properties varied dramatically within the studied population. Tooth enamel microhardness was affected by the size of its HA crystals (R= -0.476, B= -0.028, P= <0.001). Tooth shade hue was influenced by enamel HA crystal size (R= -0.358, B= -0.866, P= 0.007), tooth shade chroma was influenced by enamel HA carbonization (R= -0.419, B= -99.06, P= <0.001), and tooth shade lightness was influenced by both enamel HA crystal size (R= -0.313, B= -1.052, P= 0.019) and the degree of HA carbonization (R= -0.265, B= -57.95, P= 0.033). On the other hand, tooth enamel HA crystal size was inversely correlated with the organic relative content within tooth enamel (R= -0.352, B= -19.4, P= 0.016).;This study highlights the variation in tooth enamel ultrastructure and chemical composition, and their association with its optical and mechanical properties. For instance, we have revealed that the organic content in teeth indirectly regulates enamel mechanical and optical properties by controlling the size of HA crystals. On the other hand, variation in the degree of enamel HA carbonization can also affect the tooth optical properties. |
