You won't find visits to the dentist at the top of most people's lists of fun activities, but check-ups could be made easier by a gel that repairs and replaces damaged tooth enamel.

This is the work of an international team led by researchers at the University of Nottingham in the UK, and it has the potential to fill a gap in our extremely limited regenerative capabilities: We can't naturally regrow tooth enamel once it has decayed away, but replacing this protective covering on damaged teeth could help prevent tooth decay.

Like some previous attempts to regrow enamel, this new gel mimics how tooth enamel gets laid down in the first place. The new solution can fill in cracks in teeth, and be applied on top of bare, exposed dentine (the bone-like bulk of a tooth, below the enamel).

"When our material is applied to demineralized or eroded enamel, or exposed dentine, the material promotes the growth of crystals in an integrated and organized manner, recovering the architecture of our natural healthy enamel," says pharmaceutical scientist Abshar Hasan of the University of Nottingham in the UK.

When enamel grows for the first time, it does so via a scaffold made by natural proteins called amelogenin. Here, the researchers attempted to replicate that scaffolding using proteins called elastin-like recombinamers or ELRs.