Effect of B 2 O 3 on the structural and in vitro biological assessment of mesoporous bioactive glass nanospheres

In this paper, the boron‐containing mesoporous bioactive glass (MBG) nanospheres have been successfully synthesized by modified sol‐gel method assisted by surfactant, and the effect of boron substitution on structure and bioactivity was evaluated by combining experiments and ab initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) simulations. All of the samples exhibit regularly uniform mesoporous spherical microstructure with an average size of about 60 nm, and the boron‐containing MBGs show higher specific surface area with the value up to 416.20 m 2 /g. The simulated body fluid (SBF) immersion test confirms that the deposited hydroxyapatite (HA) evidently increases with the increasing of boron content, indicating that the biological behavior has been significantly improved resulting from incorporation of boron. Additionally, our results also reveal that B 2 O 3 substitution has positive impact on cell proliferation of human periodontal ligament cells (hPDLCs) at lower extracted concentration. Furthermore, AIMD simulation is employed to understand the relationship between structural changes and in vitro bioactivity in terms of structural information, especially the boron coordination number. The results illustrate that the boron‐containing MBG nanospheres with excellent bioactivity are great potential for biomedical applications.