Nonfouling Thin Film Hydrogels

Bacterial adhesion to surfaces is an issue that can lead to infection and disease in individuals that encounter contaminated surfaces. To prevent this, procedures for coating multiple surfaces with thin film, nonfouling polymers are being developed. Nonfouling polymers are defined as materials that resist nonspecific protein adhesion and bacteria adhesion. A few known chemistries that present nonfouling properties are zwitterionic functional groups and polyampholytes. Zwitterions are molecules that possess both a positively and negatively charged region in their structure but maintain an overall net charge of zero. One example being used in this work is sulfobetaine methacrylate (SBMA). Polyampholytes are formed with mixtures of positively and negatively charged monomers and they behave similar to zwitterions when they maintain an overall net charge of zero. The main polyampholyte coatings included in this work are formed from [2-(acryloyloxy)ethyl] trimethylammonium chloride (TMA) and 2- carboxyethyl acrylate (CAA) monomers or TMA and 3-sulfopropyl methacrylate (SA) monomers. The primary objective of this study is to develop procedures for coating thin film polymer hydrogels on three different substrates: aluminum 6061, stainless-steel, and gold. Thin films are being pursued over the more widely studied polymer brush coating techniques due to the ease of coating large surface areas through this technique. The thin film coatings are being attached to the underlying surface chemistry through surface bound species that participate in the hydrogel polymerization reaction. The results will demonstrate the successful coating procedures developed for all three metallic surfaces.