Flexible, nanoengineered polymer brush coating enhances cellular interactions at surfaces
Flexible, nanoengineered polymer brush coating enhances cellular interactions at surfaces lead image
The ability to enhance and adapt interactions between specific cells and surfaces allows the isolation of specific analytes or the acceptance of new surfaces in biological environments. Advancements in this area would provide new avenues for diagnostics, biological sensors, and synthetic or actual tissue integration.
Upcoming research in Biointerphases presents a novel polymer brush coating technology for surfaces to control the interactions with specified cells. The nanoengineered design integrates tunable, wrapped brushes with polymer materials tethered to the surface on one end and peptides on the other for scalable fabrication, tunability, biocompatibility and flexibility. Thermal processes can be used to unwrap the brushes to adjust their lengths, which change the bioconjugation properties of the surface, including the release of adhere species for reusability.
Their results indicate that the immobilization of a short peptide sequence — RGD, which promotes cell adhesion to the engineered surfaces through amino acid reactions — can be optimized by adjusting both the polymer brush composition and height to modify the reactivity, flexibility and topology of the system, as well as the peptide separation from the surface. Infrared spectroscopy of the samples identifies specific peaks from ester and amide groups that indicate bioconjugation on the surface, and the quantification of available peptides is achieved by integrating the spectral curves for optimizing system performance.
A major advantage of this design is the flexibility to control cell adhesion and migration over the surface. While the presented work discussespolymer brushes targeting amino groups, other biomolecules can be added to the ends instead to target different species, including proteins, enzymes or growth factors.
Source: “Bioinspired thermoresponsive nanoscaled coatings: Tailor-made polymer brushes with bioconjugated RGD-peptides,” by Ulla König, Evmorfia Psarra, Olga Guskova, Eva Bittrich, Klaus-Jochen Eichhorn, Martin Müller, Petra B. Welzel, Manfred Stamm, and Petra Uhlmann, Biointerphases (2018). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1116/1.5020129 .
