Increasing cell adhesion on plasma deposited fluorocarbon coatings by changing the surface topography

Abstract

In designing new biomaterials, it is of outstanding importance to consider how cells respond to specific chemical and topographical features on the material surface. The behavior of most cell types in vivo is strictly related to specific chemical and topographical cues that characterize the extra cellular environment. In particular, during their lives cells react to topographical patterns such as those of the extracellular matrix (ECM), of micro and/or nanometric dimensions. The production of micrometric and/or nanometric features on artificial materials usually involves expensive and time-consuming methods of manufacturing, such as electron beam and colloidal lithography. In this article, different "Teflon-like" structured surfaces were deposited from tetrafluoroethylene (C(2)F(4))-fed plasmas, for the study of cell adhesion and growth. The reaction of different cell lines to different topographical features was evaluated and compared with cell behavior on flat samples with the same chemical composition. Cell adhesion was calculated from area covered by cells at different time of culture. Beside this, cell proliferation was determined with the MTT test. Cell morphology and filopodia interaction with the nanofeatures were also estimated by optical and scanning electron microscopy. A dramatic difference both in adhesion and growth was found between cells seeded on flat and rough surfaces with the density and spreading of adhered cells varying as a function of the roughness of coatings.

Controlling roughness: from etching to nanotexturing and plasma-directed organization on organic and inorganic materials

“…It should also be noted that nanotexturing permits control of cell growth on the surface as recently discussed in several reports (64,65) …”

Modeling of Charging on Unconventional Surface Morphologies of PMMA Substrates During Ar Plasma Etching

“…For example, it affects wetting and optical properties of surfaces, [4,5] the adsorption of proteins on surfaces, [6,7] and the cell adhesion and growth. [8,9] The importance of roughness motivated several studies on plasma induced surface roughness of polymeric substrates; [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] the focus was on recipes eliminating or producing roughness and on the mechanisms of roughness creation and evolution.…”

PECVD of Fluorocarbon Coatings from Hexafluoropropylene Oxide: Glow vs. Afterglow

“…Generally, the goal of plasma deposition processes fed with fluorocarbons is to deposit films with composition and properties similar, or in some cases superior, to those of PTFE, in order to make them useful in several technological fields, [4] and so fluorocarbon coatings find applications in the manufacturing of textiles, paper, biomaterials, and microelectronic devices. [5][6][7][8][9] To assess how similar to Teflon 1 plasma deposited fluorocarbon coatings are in terms of their chemical/physical characteristics, a parameter named ''Teflon 1 character'' is generally estimated from X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), namely the F/C ratio. This is assumed to measure the Teflon 1 character along with the relative amount of the CF 2 moieties in the structure of the coatings: the closer the F/C ratio is to 2, the more Teflon 1 -like the composition, (CF 2 ) n , and the crystalline structure approaches that of Teflon…”