Pacific Rim Symposium on Surfaces, Coatings and Interfaces (PacSurf 2016)
    Biomaterial Surfaces & Interfaces Monday Sessions
       Session BI-MoM

Invited Paper BI-MoM8
Plasmas, Proteins and Other Things Buddy has Inspired me to Play with in Vacuum Chambers

Monday, December 12, 2016, 10:20 am, Room Milo

Session: Buddy Ratner’s 70th Birthday Session
Presenter: Sally L. McArthur, Swinburne University, Australia
Correspondent: Click to Email
Control and the ability to elicit specific responses from a biological system lies at the heart of most bioengineering. We want to immobilize proteins on biosensors but ask them to behave as they would in the body, stimulate cells to assemble into tissues, reconstructing our bodily functions. We want methods that prevent bacteria forming biofilms and better still we would like them to stop bacteria attaching to surfaces full stop. But biology is soft and normally has lots of water associated with it, so how and why would you want to use vacuum based techniques to create coatings or characterise these systems? This talk will explore how in my group and our collaborators, have tackled the challenges associated with interfacing vacuum deposited plasma polymers with water, proteins, lipids and cells to create a wide number of model systems and devices. At the same time, we have developed methods for chemically characterising these systems in vacuum, integrating XPS and ToF-SIMS with a range of other surface analytical and biological tools to gain insight into the materials we create and their interactions with biological systems.