Zinc deficiency is associated with a reduced rate of bone formation that can be corrected by supplementation of the deficient diet with adequate amounts of zinc. This study was conducted to examine the effects of zinc on bone cell parameters associated with bone formation. Tibiae were removed from 19-d-old chicken embryos and incubated for 48 h in Dulbecco's modified Eagle's medium supplemented with antibiotics, bovine serum albumin, and HEPES. The addition of zinc (25-200 g/dL) to tibial cultures resulted in a concentration-dependent increase in alkaline phosphatase activity, an increase in the incorporation of proline into bone protein and an increase in the post-translational oxidation of proline to peptidyl hydroxyproline. These effects of zinc were all diminished by the addition of 2,6-pyridine dicarboxylic acid, a chelator of zinc. The addition of either cycloheximide (10(-5)M), dactinomycin (10(-8)M), or hydroxyurea (10(-3)M) to tibial cultures also attenuated the effects of zinc. The effect of zinc on bone cell DNA synthesis was measured by following the incorporation of 3H-thymidine into DNA and by fluorometric measurement of cellular DNA content. These methods revealed that the addition of zinc to cultured tibiae resulted in a concentration-dependent increase in tibial DNA content and synthesis rate. The magnitude of the zinc-induced DNA increase was similar to the magnitude of the zinc-induced increases in alkaline phosphatase activity, proline incorporation, and hydroxyproline synthesis. Normalization of these latter responses to tibial DNA content yield data indicating that the effect of zinc on bone formation results from a zinc-induced increase in bone cell proliferation.

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The addition of physiological concentrations of zinc (25-200 (microg/dL) to Dulbecco's Modified Eagle's Medium containing tibiae from 19-d chick embryos resulted in a concentration-dependent increase in tibial content of tartrate-resistant acid phosphatase (TRAP) and an increase in bone resorption, as measured by tibial calcium release. This increase in bone resorption was additive to the resorptive effect resulting from the addition of 10(-9)-10(-7) M parathyroid hormone (PTH), but was not additive to similar effects produced by the addition of 10(-9)-10(-7) M prostaglandin E2 (PGE2). An inhibitor of prostaglandin synthesis, flurbiprofen (10[-6] M), did not influence the effect of zinc on bone resorption. However, the addition of 2,6-pyridinedicarboxylic acid (10[-3] M, 2,6-PDCA), a chelator of zinc, did attenuate the effects of zinc, as did the addition of an inhibitor of DNA replication (hydroxyurea, 10[-3] M). Hydroxyurea also attenuated the bone resorptive response to PGE2, but had no influence on the effects of PTH. These results indicate that physiological concentrations of zinc alter bone resorptive rates in vitro by a mechanism that is dependent on DNA replication.

We propose a new system for building a 3D database for human teeth. Real extracted human teeth are scanned using a cone-beam CT scanner to build. The teeth models are segmented from the resulting images by means of level sets. The database includes 3D models of these teeth after minimizing global differences between the models. An affine transformation function is used to model the differences between the models. The transformation parameters are estimated by minimizing a least squares energy. A total of 280 teeth 3-D models have been created to build the real database and demonstrate the performance of the proposed framework.