Bioengineering Seminar Series: Jenny Lock

Friday, April 18, 2014
9:00 a.m.-10:00 a.m.
Pepco Room (1105), Jeong H. Kim Engineering Building
Professor Ian White
ianwhite@umd.edu

Electron beam-generated plasmas for biomaterial processing*

Jenny Lock
Plasma Physics Division 
Naval Research Laboratory

Electron beam generated plasmas have been successfully used in a wide range of materials processing applications including etching, thin film deposition and surface functionalization. Compared to conventional discharges, these plasma sources have a number of unique characteristics but, perhaps the most unique is the ability to generate high plasma densities and their inherently low electron temperatures (> 1eV). Thus, the source is capable of delivering a flux of very low energy (> 5 eV) ions. This makes these sources ideally suited for next-generation applications that require atomically smooth and/or thin materials such as polymers and graphene. In this talk, I will focus on our recent efforts adding functional groups to the surface of polymers without altering the surface morphology and the use of these modified-polymers as platforms for the immobilization of biomolecules.

Polymeric materials (polystyrene, polypropylene, etc.) have been successfully used for biomedical and bioanalytical applications. Polymers are cost effective, have excellent optical and mechanical properties, and readily adsorb biomolecules via non-covalent interactions. However, the poor chemical resistance and difficulty controlling surface chemistry often result in protein denaturation upon adsorptive immobilization, as well as desorption and/or loss of biomolecule activity. We have recently developed and patented a method for chemically functionalizing commercial microtiter plates to facilitate covalent immobilization of biomolecules through silane chemistry.  Compared to physisorption, covalent bioimmobilization minimizes desorption and maintains long-term biochemical stability. Another distinct advantage of the plasma treatment is that it provides an excellent attachment strategy for small molecules such as peptides, which may otherwise bind weakly or with improper orientation by physical adsorption.  Lastly, the plasma-treated plates performed on par or better than commercially available pre-activated microtiter plates. Moreover, in contrast to commercial microtiter plates that utilize single attachment chemistry for all wells, plasma-treatment coupled with conventional silane chemistry provides a wide variety of bioimmobilization schemes on a single plate. Although this work involved polystyrene plates, we suspect that this approach could be used on other polymeric platforms of varying complexities as well.

*This work is supported by Naval Research Laboratory Base Program.

About the Speaker

Evgeniya Lock is a research physicist in the Plasma Physics Division at the Naval Research Laboratory. She joined the plasma processing group as a National Research Council (NRC) postdoctoral fellow in 2006 before becoming a staff member in 2009. Dr. Lock obtained her Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from theUniversityofIllinois-Chicago. Her interests lie in both the fundamental understanding of plasma-induced polymer modification and in the development of new applications of plasma modified polymers. 

Audience: Graduate  Faculty  Post-Docs 

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