AVS 52nd International Symposium
    Biomaterial Interfaces Thursday Sessions
       Session BI-ThA

Paper BI-ThA6
In-situ Microcontact Printing of Proteins

Thursday, November 3, 2005, 3:40 pm, Room 311

Session: Bionanotechnology
Presenter: D. Mayer, Research Center Juelich, Germany
Authors: D. Mayer, Research Center Juelich, Germany
D. Schwaab, Research Center Juelich, Germany
O. Salomon, Research Center Juelich, Germany
A. Offenhaeusser, Research Center Juelich, Germany
A. Yasuda, Sony International (Europe) GmbH, Germany
J. Wessels, Sony International (Europe) GmbH, Germany
Correspondent: Click to Email
Soft lithography appears to be a promising candidate among other techniques like electron beam-, ion beam- or x-ray lithography, in order to define structures below 100 nm. In contrast to the others, soft lithography has the advantage of being a relatively simple low costs technique. In addition, the technique can in principle be applied for large areas and therefore provides a fast lithography process. Furthermore soft lithography is fully chemical and bio-compatible. The main objective of the presented work is to establish a powerful technique in order to transfer biomolecules to functional surfaces with structure size beyond the limit of photolithography. On this account we have developed a novel in-situ approach for the patterned transfer of proteins. The proposed technique is a modification of the commonly used Microcontact Printing (@mu@CP). The main derivative is that all transfer steps are performed under physiological conditions. For testing the capabilities of in-situ Microcontact Printing we have used horse heart cytochrome c (cyt c) as model molecule. Electrochemical investigations were performed to compare the conventional and the new in-situ @mu@CP method by measuring the redox activity of cyt c transferred with different techniques. We succeeded to print proteins under conservation of their structural integrity and functionality, while the activity of molecules transferred with conventional @mu@CP is much lower. In addition we will demonstrate by means of surface scanning microscopy methods that this technique is also capable of transfer patterns with a critical dimension of 150nm.