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Worldwide, over 20 million patients suffer from bone disorders annually. Bone scaffolds are designed to integrate into host tissue without causing adverse reactions. Recently, chitosan, an easily available natural polymer, has been considered a suitable scaffold for bone tissue growth as it is a biocompatible, biodegradable, and non-toxic material with antimicrobial activity and osteoinductive capacity. In this work, chitosan was covalently and selectively biofunctionalized with two suitably designed bioactive synthetic peptides: a Vitronectin sequence (HVP) and a BMP-2 peptide (GBMP1a). Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) investigations highlighted the presence of the peptides grafted to chitosan (named Chit-HVP and Chit-GBMP1a). Chit-HVP and Chit-GBMP1a porous scaffolds promoted human osteoblasts adhesion, proliferation, calcium deposition, and gene expression of three crucial osteoblast proteins. In particular, Chit-HVP highly promoted adhesion and proliferation of osteoblasts, while Chit-GBMP1a guided cell differentiation towards osteoblastic phenotype.

Despite the well-known favorable chemical and mechanical properties of titanium-based materials for orthopedic and dental applications, poor osseointegration of the implants, bacteria adhesion, and excessive inflammatory response from the host remain major problems to be solved. Here, the antioxidant and anti-inflammatory enzyme-like abilities of ceria (CeOx) were coupled to the advantageous features of titanium nanotubes (TiNTs). Cost-effective and fast methods, such as electrochemical anodization and drop casting, were used to build active surfaces with enhanced bioactivity. Surface composition, electrochemical response, and in vitro ability to induce hydroxyapatite (HA) precipitation were evaluated. The amount of cerium in the coating did not significantly affect wettability, yet a growing ability to induce early HA precipitation from simulated body fluid (SBF) was observed as the oxide content at the surface increased. The presence of 4%wt CeOx was also able to stimulate rapid HA maturation in a (poorly) crystalline form, indicating an interesting potential to induce rapid in vivo osseointegration process.

In the last years, intense efforts have been made in order to obtain colloidal-based systems capable of pointing out the presence of melamine in food samples. In this work, we reported about the recognition of melamine in aqueous solution, using gold nanoparticles stabilized with 3-mercapto-1-propanesulfonate (AuNPs-3MPS), with the aim of deepening how the recognition process works. AuNPs were synthesized using a wet chemical reduction method. The synthesized AuNPs-3MPS probe was fully characterized, before and after the recognition process, by both physicochemical (UV–vis, FT-IR, 1H-NMR, DLS and ζ-potential) and morphostructural techniques (AFM, HR-TEM). The chemical and electronic structure was also investigated by SR-XPS. The sensing method is based on the melamine-induced aggregation of AuNPs; the presence of melamine was successfully detected in the range of 2.5−500 ppm. The results achieved also demonstrate that negatively charged AuNPs-3MPS are potentially useful for determining melamine contents in aqueous solution. SR-XPS measurements allowed to understand interaction mechanism between the probe and the analyte. The presence of sulfonate groups allows a mutual interaction mediated by electrostatic bonds between nanoparticles surface thiols and positively charged amino groups of melamine molecules.