| AVS 54th International Symposium | |
| Marine Biofouling Topical Conference | Monday Sessions |
| Session MB+BI-MoA |
| Session: | Control of Marine Bioadhesion |
| Presenter: | A. Rosenhahn, University of Heidelberg, Germany |
| Correspondent: | Click to Email |
The prevention of biofouling is a major challenge for all man made objects which are in long term contact with seawater. In order to systematically develop non toxic coatings, a fundamental understanding of basic surface properties that inhibit or encourage settlement of marine inhabitants is required. Together with biological partner groups within the EU IP AMBIO1 we investigate the influence of surface properties such as wetting, charge or morphology on the adhesion and on the removal properties for different marine organisms. To tune wetting and chemical surface properties, self assembly is used as highly versatile technique. For preparation of well defined micro- and nanomorphologies, different lithography and multilayer approaches are used. The interaction of different marine inhabitants with these surfaces will be discussed and compared to general protein resistive properties. Although one main focus of this work is inhibition of settlement, also release properties are tested as important measure of adhesion strength. Apart from established ways of evaluating anti fouling properties, we use digital in-line holography as new tool to study and compare the exploration of different surfaces by swimming marine organisms.2 Following the original idea of D. Gabor,3 coherent scattering of radiation can be used to record scattering patterns which contain three dimensional information about investigated objects due to the presence of a reference wave. Holography therefore allows the investigation of three dimensional processes e.g. by tracking particles in real time with sub¬micrometer resolution.4 We use this novel technique to visualize and analyze the motion and exploration behavior of swimming marine organisms towards surfaces with systematically changing properties. The goal of these three dimensional tracking experiments is to gain a more detailed understanding about surface sensing and the early attachment stages of marine organisms.
1 Ambio : Advanced Nanostructured Surfaces for the control of biofouling, FP6 EU integrated project, http://www.AMBIO.bham.ac.uk/
2 M. Heydt, A. Rosenhahn, M. Grunze, M. Pettit, M.E. Callow, J.A. Callow, The Jornal of Adhesion, in press
3 D. Gabor, Nature 1948, 161, 777
4 W.Xu, M.H. Jericho, H.J. Kreuzer, Opt. Lett. 2003, 28(3), 164