Motility Control of Bacteria-Actuated Biodegradable Polymeric Microstructures by Selective Adhesion Methods

Autor: Hyung Jung Yoo, Sangmin Lee, Dong-il Dan Cho
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2014
Předmět:
Zdroj: Micromachines, Vol 5, Iss 4, Pp 1287-1295 (2014)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 2072-666X
DOI: 10.3390/mi5041287
Popis: Certain bacteria have motility and can be made non-toxic, and using them for drug delivery has been proposed. For example, using bacteria with flagella motion in multiple spin actuators in drug delivery microrobots has been suggested. This paper investigates various adhesion enhancement methods for attaching bacteria on preferred surfaces of cubic polymeric microstructures to achieve the directional control of motion. Serratia marcescens which has an excellent swimming behavior and 50-μm sized cubic structures made of biodegradable poly-capro-lactone (PCL) are used. Three treatment methods are investigated and compared to the untreated control case. The first method is retarding bacterial attachments by coating certain surfaces with bovine serum albumin (BSA) which makes those surfaces anti-adherent to bacteria. The second and third methods are roughening the surfaces with X-ray irradiation and plasma respectively to purposely increase bacterial attachments on the roughened surfaces. The measured motilities of bacteria-tethered PCL microactuators are 1.40 μm/s for the BSA coating method, 0.82 μm/s for the X-ray irradiation, and 3.89 μm/s for the plasma treatment method. Therefore, among the methods investigated in the paper the plasma treatment method achieves the highest directionality control of bacteria motility.
Databáze: Directory of Open Access Journals