Hold it Together

As a teenager your prized popstar poster didn’t just stick to the wall, it needed sticky tack to bridge between paper and plaster. Creating strong bonds between different materials, such as the soft tendons and hard bone of your shoulder’s rotator cuff, isn’t easy. This connection is hard to repair when injured, so researchers are investigating its structure. A study combined experiments, simulations, and new imaging techniques to examine the enthesis (pictured, artificially coloured to visualise the structure) at the join between tendons and bone and revealed a hidden fibrous material securing the connection. This adhesion balances overall toughness with individual strength, allowing a few fibres to break under strain if necessary to prevent the overall structure losing its grip. Understanding these mechanics could help surgeons ensure the full fibre structure repairs, and gives a new perspective for engineers combining contrasting materials.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Video by Mikhail Golman and colleagues
• Departments of Orthopedic Surgery and Biomedical Engineering, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
• Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
• Published in Science Advances, November 2021