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    Tailored polyurethane acrylate blend for large-scale and high-performance micropatterned dry adhesives
    (Dordrecht [u.a.] : Springer Science + Business Media B.V, 2019) Yu, Dan; Hensel, René; Beckelmann, Dirk; Opsölder, Michael; Schäfer, Bruno; Moh, Karsten; de Oliveira, Peter William; Arzt, Eduard
    Continuous roll-to-roll fabrication is essential for transferring the idea of bio-inspired, fibrillar dry adhesives into large-scale, synthetic, high-performance adhesive tapes. Toward this aim, we investigated process parameters that allow us to control the morphology and the resulting adhesion of mushroom-shaped micropatterned surfaces. Flexible silicone templates enabled the replication process of the polyurethane acrylate pre-polymer involving UV-light-induced cross-linking. For this paper, we particularly tailored the polyurethane acrylate pre-polymer by adding chemical components to tune UV curing kinetics and to reduce oxygen inhibition of radicals. We found that higher intensities of the UV light and faster reaction kinetics improved the quality of the microstructures, i.e., a larger cap diameter of the mushroom tips was achieved. The polymer blend U6E4 exhibited the fastest curing kinetics, which resulted in a micromorphology similar to that of the Ni-shim master structures. Best adhesion results were obtained for adhesive tapes made from U6E4 with 116 kPa pull-off stress, 1.4 N cm−1 peel strength and 71 kPa shear strength. In addition, repeated attachment–detachment tests over 100,000 cycles demonstrated strong robustness and reusability.
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    Vimentin intermediate filament rings deform the nucleus during the first steps of adhesion
    (Lausanne : Frontiers Media, 2019) Terriac, E.; Schütz, S.; Lautenschläger, F.
    During cell spreading, cells undergo many changes to their architecture and their mechanical properties. Vimentin, as an integral part of the cell architecture, and its mechanical stability must adapt to the new state of the cell. This study focuses on the structures formed by vimentin during the first steps of cell adhesion. Very early, ball-like structures, or “knots,” are seen and often vimentin filaments emerge in the shape of rings around the nucleus. Although intermediate filaments are not known to be associated to motor proteins to form contractile systems, these rings can nonetheless strongly deform the cell nucleus. In the first 6 to 12 h of adhesion, these vimentin knots and rings disappear, and the intermediate filament network returns to the state seen before detachment of the cells. As these vimentin structures are very transient in the early steps of cell spreading, they have rarely been described in the literature. However, they can also be seen during mitosis, which is an event that involves partial detachment and re-spreading of the cells. Interestingly, the turnover dynamics of vimentin are reduced in both the knots and rings, compared to vimentin in the lamellipodia. It remains to define how the force is transmitted from the ball-like structures to the rings, and to measure the impact of such strong nuclear deformation on gene expression during cell re-spreading and the rearrangement of the vimentin network. Copyright © 2019 Terriac, Schütz and Lautenschläger. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
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    Strength of bacterial adhesion on nanostructured surfaces quantified by substrate morphometry
    (London : Royal Society of Chemistry, 2019) Spengler, C.; Nolle, F.; Mischo, J.; Faidt, T.; Grandthyll, S.; Thewes, N.; Koch, M.; Müller, F.; Bischoff, M.; Klatt, M.A.; Jacobs, K.
    Microbial adhesion and the subsequent formation of resilient biofilms at surfaces are decisively influenced by substrate properties, such as the topography. To date, studies that quantitatively link surface topography and bacterial adhesion are scarce, as both are not straightforward to quantify. To fill this gap, surface morphometry combined with single-cell force spectroscopy was performed on surfaces with irregular topographies on the nano-scale. As surfaces, hydrophobized silicon wafers were used that were etched to exhibit surface structures in the same size range as the bacterial cell wall molecules. The surface structures were characterized by a detailed morphometric analysis based on Minkowski functionals revealing both qualitatively similar features and quantitatively different extensions. We find that as the size of the nanostructures increases, the adhesion forces decrease in a way that can be quantified by the area of the surface that is available for the tethering of cell wall molecules. In addition, we observe a bactericidal effect, which is more pronounced on substrates with taller structures but does not influence adhesion. Our results can be used for a targeted development of 3D-structured materials for/against bio-adhesion. Moreover, the morphometric analysis can serve as a future gold standard for characterizing a broad spectrum of material structures. © The Royal Society of Chemistry 2019.