Cerium-Doped Chiral Copper Superstructures For Osteogenic Induction.

Oral and maxillofacial bone defects impact patients' appearance, function, and quality of life. Traditional bone grafting has many issues, while chirality shows potential in regulating cell behavior and promoting osteogenesis, offering new treatment ideas. This study regulates the coordination self-assembly of copper, cerium, and chiral ligands to construct a chiral superstructure platform, optimize its topology, and conduct in vitro osteogenic induction and in vivo rat cranial defect experiments, offering a new perspective for bone tissue engineering research. By altering the molar ratios of L/D-Cys, Ce³⁺, Cu²⁺, five chiral superstructures were synthesized: L1/D1 ("double A"), L2/D2 ("four-leaf clover"), L3/D3 ("Chinese knot"), L4/D4 ("mixed"), L5/D5 ("long rod"). All exhibit mirror-symmetric CD signals. L2/D2 growth observations show chiral structures form at 40 min, "four-leaf clover" completes at 60 min, and G-factor increases over time, indicating perfected chirality.CCK-8 assays demonstrate that these chiral superstructures promote MC3T3-E1 cell proliferation. In vitro ALP and ARS staining and semi-quantitative experiments reveal that the L2/D2 groups have the best osteogenic effects, with L2 outperforming D2. In vivo experiments using an SD rat cranial defect model show that L2 has the strongest osteogenic induction ability. The experiment successfully prepared cerium-doped chiral copper superstructures, which promote MC3T3-E1 cell proliferation and exhibit good biocompatibility. In vitro and in vivo osteogenic experiments show that L2 have better osteogenic properties without damaging healthy tissues