Abstract
Most of substrates made of commonly used polymers such as polystyrene (PS) or poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) do not display effective functional groups for biomimetic hydroxyapatite (HAp) mineralization that is triggered by heterogeneous nucleation. In this study, we demonstrated that adsorption layers of serum proteins such as human serum albumin (HSA) on these polymer substrate surfaces induced HAp deposition in 1.5SBF and that such protein-mediated HAp deposition behaviors were different between PS and PMMA, which was probably due to the difference in protein adsorption amounts on these polymer substrates. We also revealed that HAp deposition on HSA-adsorbed PS substrate surfaces was enhanced by aqueous calcium chloride treatments before immersion in 1.5SBF.
