Chicken crystalline forms

Lundy and Eanes (1973) reported lengths in the c-axis direction of 200-400 A and microstrains of 3 to 4 x 10 determined from line broadening of the 002 and 004 apatite reflections from mineralized turkey leg tendon. They also tabulated earlier measurements of the dimensions of biological apatites in the c-axis direction. Wide-angle XRD also shows that older bone mineral is better crystallized than newly formed mineral. For example, Bonar et al. (1983) measured the improvement in crystallinity for bone from embryonic to 2-year-old chickens. They reported that the coherence length (neglecting microstrain) calculated from the Scherrer formula from the 002 peak increased from 107 to 199 A. In a similar study of bone from 3-week to 2-year-old rats (Ziv and Weiner 1994), the change in the same quantity was from approximately 200 to 280 A (means of 3 measurements). 

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