AVS 57th International Symposium & Exhibition
    Marine Biofouling Topical Conference Monday Sessions
       Session MB+BI+AS-MoA

Invited Paper MB+BI+AS-MoA1
Zwitterionic Polymers for Non-Fouling Coatings

Monday, October 18, 2010, 2:00 pm, Room Navajo

Session: Preventing & Characterizing Marine Biofouling
Presenter: G. Tew, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Correspondent: Click to Email
Biofouling remains a challenging problem for various fields ranging from biomedical applications and marine coatings technology, to water purification, transport, and storage systems. To date, the most widely employed protein repellent materials are poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) or oligo(ethylene glycol) (OEG) based. Even though PEG shows excellent nonfouling character, it has low stability in the presence of oxygen and transition metal ions found in most biochemical solutions, which pushed the field to search for more robust non-fouling materials. Having hygroscopic nature similar to PEG as well as a biomimetic character, arising from their structural similarity to the head groups of lipids comprising cell membranes, zwitterions such as 2-methacryloyloxyethyl phosphorylcholine (MPC) and more recently carboxy/sulfobetaines have also been investigated as protein resistant materials. These materials concentrate only on hydrophilic modification of the substrates. However, the real biological environment is populated by different species, which have different attachment mechanisms; some prefer to adhere more on hydrophilic surfaces whereas others prefer more hydrophobic substrates. The solution to this problem has been investigated by engineering surfaces that reconstruct depending on the environment they are being exposed to, which has been found to be relatively easy to obtain with amphiphilic materials. However, these approaches are either still not sufficient to inhibit bioadhesion by themselves or they suffer from complex or labor intensive coatings preparation conditions. In this work, we are introducing a new polymeric system which carries dual functionality at the repeat unit level, a zwitterionic functionality coupled with an alkyl moiety that can be varied to adjust the amphiphilicity of the overall system. The alkyl group is varied to include PEG based, hydrocarbon, and fluorinated chains. Using these ring-opening metathesis polymerization (ROMP) based zwitterionic polymers as the foundation for non-fouling coatings, we are trying to understand what role the overall hydrophilicity/amphiphilicity of the materials play in fouling prevention.