A Universal Approach to Crosslinked Hierarchical Polymer Multilayers as Stable and Highly Effective Antifouling Coatings

摘要

Nonspecific adsorption of proteins on material surfaces is a major problem that can result in inflammation, bacterial adhesion, irritation of the surrounding tissue, and improper function of medical devices. Therefore, improving the antifouling properties of material surfaces plays an important role in biomedical applications. More than thousands of surface coatings have been developed for this purpose, most of which can be classified into two types. The first type is direct immobilization of bioinert monolayer coatings on substrates. The other is grafting bioinert monolayer coatings to a chemical active foundation layers, e.g., layer by layer (LbL) coatings and polydopamine coatings. In both cases, macromolecular tail groups of the terminal molecules may limit further immobilization of other feasible adsorbates to form a dense single monolayer on substrates or foundation layers, due to steric crowding. Therefore, incompletely coated substrates or foundation layers may cause protein adsorption. Especially the foundation layers of charged LbL coatings and chemical active polydopamine adsorb even more proteins than the bare substrates. Moreover, most of the current coatings such as immobilized monolayers and LbL coatings can only be employed on some specific substrates. Thus it is urgent to develop new methods to create stable and perfect bioinert coatings.