On the Mechanics of Partially Mineralized Tissues and Their Implications for the Attachment of Tendon to Bone

The mechanical implications of adding prescribed amounts of mineral to collagen are important for understanding bone development and the attachment of tendon to bone. Bone and tendon both have at their core hierarchical networks of collagen that has been elucidated recently at the nanoscale [1]. In bone and in partially mineralized tissues, this network accommodates varying degrees of mineral at the nanoscale in channels that that form within collagen fibrils, and subsequently on the exterior of fibrils [2]. We hypothesized that the details of this accommodation of mineral have important mechanical consequences for partially mineralized tissues, and built a simple multi-scale model to quantify these effects.