Data from in vivo functionalization of diatom mesoporous biosilica with bisphosphonates

• Main Authors: Gabriella Leone, Danilo Vona, Elvira De Giglio, Maria Addolorata Bonifacio, Stefania Cometa, Saverio Fiore, Fabio Palumbo, Roberta Ragni, Gianluca M. Farinola, Stefania R. Cicco
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier 2019-06-01
• Series: Data in Brief
• Online Access: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352340919301829

Diatoms are unicellular photosynthetic microalgae that produce a sophisticated mesoporous biosilica shell called frustule. Easy to achieve and extract, diatom frustules represent a low-cost source of mesoporous biocompatible biosilica. In this paper, the possibility to in vivo functionalize the diatom biosilica with bisphosphonates (BPs) was investigated. In particular, two BPs were tested: the amino-containing sodium alendronate (ALE) and the amino-lacking sodium etidronate (ETI). According to first SEM-EDX analysis, the presence of the amino-moiety in ALE structure allowed a better incorporation of this BP into living diatom biosilica, compared to ETI. Then, diatom growth was deeply investigated in presence of ALE. After extraction of functionalized frustules, ALE-biosilica was further characterized by XPS and microscopy, and ALE release was evaluated by ferrochelation assay. Moreover, the bone regeneration performances of ALE-functionalized frustules were preliminarily investigated on bone osteoblast-like cells, via Comassie staining. Data are related to the research article “In vivo functionalization of diatom biosilica with sodium alendronate as osteoactive material”.