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. 2018 Jan 19;8:1191. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-19253-w

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© The Author(s) 2018

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Mechanism of biomolecular regulation of mineral in bone. Crystals nucleate (left) under the cooperative action of OC and OPN, and possibly other NCPs. The highly charged OPN aids in the recruitment of essential ionic groups and charged trace elements. Proteoglycans or ion-transport mechanisms may also be responsible for such a recruitment process. OC regulates crystal growth (center) along the long axis of collagen, by attaching at favorable crystallographic locations on the growing crystal. Finally, crystals agglomerate with each other through the formation of OC-OPN linkages, when they arrive at another nucleation site. (Image credits: Mark Esposito, 2017).