19March 2022 ESRFnews

BIOMECHANICS

THE name may not be familiar to everyone, but enthesitis is one of the most common types of ligament damage. An inflammation of the enthesis, where a ligament attaches to bone, it results in some 2 bn in treatment in France alone. Such treatment has limited long-term success, though. Our bodies cannot regenerate enthesis, and scientists know little about its biomechanics primarily because the mesoscale origin of that biomechanics is very hard to see. That might soon change. Thanks to a new starting

grant from the European Research Council (ERC), Tilman Grünewald, a scientist at the Institut Fresnel (Aix-Marseille University/CNRS/Centrale Marseille) in France, is planning to develop a new synchrotron diffrac- tion technique, texture tomography , at the ESRF that will be able to expose organisation and crystallographic texture on the mesoscale, while keeping a large field of

Backed by the European Research Council, one ESRF user is hoping to understand the crystallographic texture of biomineralised materials and help those with orthopaedic injuries.

view. Supported by his collaborators at the Institut des Sciences du Mouvement in Marseille, he hopes that the results will reveal the structural make-up of the enthesis for the first time and give hope for the rehabilitation of those suffering from related orthopaedic injuries. Grünewald s path to the ESRF was not a conven-

tional one. He obtained his masters degree in 2012 at the Salzburg University of Applied Sciences, not in physics but in wood science. Initially he was fascinated by the nano- structures of wood, but quickly realised that he needed to follow a different trajectory to understand the nanostruc- tural aspects of biomaterials. I realised that building fur- niture for IKEA was not what I wanted to do with my life, he recalls, jokingly. It was for that reason he undertook a PhD in biomineralisation at the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences in Vienna, Austria, and got a proper education in X-ray scattering . The

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Seeking texture