The smallest apatite mineralites found in nature reside in vertebrate bone tissue. These nanoapatites participate in the formation of a protein/mineral composite with unique physical and biological properties. The composite has distinct structural features at the 10 nm, 100 nm, 1 um, 100 um, and 1 cm length scales. We analyzed the natural material on the 1-1000 nm length scale with the purpose of setting the design criteria for synthetically duplicating the material. Using a biomimetic motif, we synthesized nanomineralites with size and shape approximately equal to the natural material.

We show that our synthetic mineralites compare with the natural apatites. Recently the average size of naturally occurring mineralites in mature bovine bone was shown to be 12 nm X 10 nm X 0.61 nm. Similar experiments on 1-3 week old bovine bone mineralites showed an average size of9nm X 6nm X 2.0 nm. Within a standard deviation, the length and width of the two populations are equal.