Shedding light (… electrons) on human bone ultrastructure with correlative on-axis electron tomography and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy tomography

ABSTRACT Mineralized collagen fibrils are the building block units of bone at the nanoscale. While it is known that collagen fibrils are mineralized both inside their gap zones (intra-fibrillar mineralization) and on their outer surfaces (extra-fibrillar mineralization), a clear visualization of this architecture in three dimensions (3D), combining structural and compositional information over large volumes, but without …