Fabricating a reactive surface on the fibroin film by a room-temperature plasma jet array for biomolecule immobilization

A simple dielectric barrier discharge（DBD） jet array was designed with a liquid electrode and helium gas.The characteristics of the jet array discharge and the preliminary polymerization with acrylic acid（AA） monomer were presented.The plasma reactor can produce a cold jet array with a gas temperature lower than 315 K,using an applied discharge power between 6 W and 30 W（V dis × I dis）.A silk fibroin film（SFF） was modified using the jet array and AA monomer,and the treated SFF samples were characterized by atomic force microscopy（AFM）,scanning electron microscopy（SEM）,Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy（FTIR）,and contact angle（CA）.The deposition rate of the poly acrylic acid（PAA） was able to reach 300 nm/min,and the surface roughness and energy increased with the AA flow rate.The FTIR results indicate that the modified SFF had more carboxyl groups（-COOH） than the original SFF.This latter characteristic allowed the modified SFF to immobilize more quantities of antimicrobial peptide（AP,LL-37） which inhibited the Escherichia coli（E.Coli） effectively.

Three different low-temperature plasma-based methods for hydrophilicity improvement of polyethylene films at atmospheric pressure

Three different low-temperature plasma-based methods were used to improve the surface hydrophilicity of polyethy- lene （PE） films, and all the modification processes were carried out by employing an atmospheric pressure plasma jet （APPJ） system. （a） PE films were directly modified by APPJ using a gas mixture of He and 02. （b） Acrylic acid （AA） was introduced into the system and a polymer acrylic acid （PAA） coating was deposited onto the PE films. （c） AA was grafted onto the PE surface activated by plasma pre-treatment. It was found that the hydrophilicity of the PE films was significantly improved for all the three methods. However, the samples modified by Process （a） showed hydrophobicity recovery after a storage time of 20 days while no significant change was found in samples modified by Process （b） and Process （c）. The Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy （FTIR） results indicated that the most intensive C=O peak was detected on the PE surface modified by Process （c）. According to the X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy （XPS） analysis, the ratios of oxygen-containing polar groups for samples modified by Process （b） and Process （c） were higher than that modified by Process （a）.