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SSBII3
Biological Complexity, Surface Information and Surface Control: Buddy D. Ratner After personally performing biomaterials research for 32 years, it troubles me that I can confidently state that we have no concrete rules for designing surfaces for protein adsorption, for blood compatibility, for cell growth or for biocompatibility. This is not to say that we do not have surfaces that perform reasonably for these applications. It is just that there are no tabulated design parameters we can bring to bear when we need to create a surface with specific performance criteria. The roots of this conundrum will be examined in this talk. New strategies for surface engineering will be presented based upon copying how nature does its work. Once we can envision such biomimetic surfaces, we find they have a degree of complexity that challenges our surface analytical equipment. Supported lipid bilayer membranes are a classic example of this complexity. They can contain many biomolecular components proteins, sugars lipids), hydrated hydrogel components, hydrophobic components, multilayer structures and fine spatial (pattern) information in the plane of the surface. The talk will go on to examine the new methods that may advance our abilities to study these surfaces. Mention will be made of static secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS), NMR, surface plasmon resonance, scanning probe microscopy, synchrotron methods and sum frequency generation. |
