Abstract
Current research on surface modifications has yielded advanced implant biomaterials. Various implant surface modifications have been shown to be promising in improving bone target cell response, but more comprehensive studies whether certain implant surface modifications can directly target cell behavioural features such as morphogenesis and proliferation are needed. Here, we studied the response of primary alveolar bone cells on various implant surface modifications in terms of osteoblast morphology and proliferation in vitro. Analyses of surface modifications led to surface-related test parameters including the topographical parameters micro-roughness, texture aspect and surface enlargement as well as the physicochemical parameter surface wettability. We compared osteoblast morphology and proliferation towards the above-mentioned parameters and found that texture aspect and surface enlargement but not surface roughness or wettability exhibited significant impact on osteoblast morphology and proliferation. Detailed analysis revealed osteoblast proliferation as a function of cell morphology, substantiated by an osteoblast size- and morphology-dependent increase in mitotic activity. These findings show that implant surface topography controls cell behavioural morphology and subsequently cell proliferation, thereby opening the road for cell instructive biomaterials.
Highlights
Current research on surface modifications has yielded advanced implant biomaterials
In order to characterize the differently modified zirconia surfaces with respect to their topographical and physicochemical properties, we employed scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and interferometry (IFM) to visualize and quantitatively grasp the surface topography, performed EDX analysis to describe the chemical composition and contact angle measurement to characterize the wettability of the biomaterial surfaces
SEM micrographs revealed that the topography of the only-sintered Y-TZP surface was changed from a surface with grainy peaks to a surface with smoother and denser characteristics, which was devoid of aforementioned structures, by blasting
Summary
Current research on surface modifications has yielded advanced implant biomaterials. Various implant surface modifications have been shown to be promising in improving bone target cell response, but more comprehensive studies whether certain implant surface modifications can directly target cell behavioural features such as morphogenesis and proliferation are needed. Together with the results from clinical studies which report a lack of beneficial effect of implant surface roughness on the long-term preservation of the peri-implant marginal bone level[7], these findings suggest that other details of the surface structure can be more determining on cell-biomaterial interaction than their roughness degree[8] In this context, the work of several studies suggests that distinct structural micro- and/or nanoscale features, which arise from the different surface modification techniques, may play a significant role in influencing target cell behaviour and define the quality of bone integration[9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20]. Such knowledge would greatly enhance our capability to rationally design novel biomaterials for instructing cell behaviour[17]
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