Surface-Morphology Gradients
In materials science, roughness on a micrometer and nanometer scale plays an important role in contact-related phenomena, such as tribology or adhesion. It is also well known that roughness over a wide range of length scales affects the biological response to surfaces, e.g. cell adhesion, morphology, proliferation and differentiation. The understanding of these cellular behaviors in connection to the surface topography is crucial in the further development of medical implants.
However, the influence of roughness in biological and materials science applications has only rarely been systematically studied. Yet the findings of such systematical studies would greatly facilitate the tailoring of a surface for a specific application rather than creating surfaces by purely empirical approaches.
Motivated by the demand of substrata to systematically study roughness-related phenomena, methods for the generation of morphological gradients on different roughness scales have been developed at LSST. First a gradient of micrometer roughness-size feature was developed, by slow immersion of a sand-blasted aluminum sheet into a polishing solution. A nanometer roughness feature-size gradient was achieved by immersion of a flat silicon wafer into a silica particle suspension. Both those gradients have been combined to create an orthogonal gradient, in order to study the synergetic effects of both micrometer and nanometer feature-size roughness in any combination.
References
PhD Theses
- external pageMorphological gradients for biomedical applicationscall_made
Christian Zink, PhD Thesis, No. 19925, ETH Zürich, 2011. - external pageSurface Morphology Gradientscall_made
Tobias Künzler, PhD Thesis, No. 17049, ETH Zürich, 2007. - external pageSelf-assembly of functionalized nanoparticles into microarrays and gradientscall_made
Christoph Huwiler, PhD Thesis, No. 16783, ETH Zürich, 2006.
Journal papers
- external pageOrthogonal nanometer-micrometer roughness gradients probe morphological influences on cell behaviorcall_made
Zink, C.; Hall, H.; Brunette, D. M.; Spencer, N. D., Biomaterials, 2012, 33(32) pp 8055-8061. - external pageEffects of Surface Micro-Topography on the Assembly of the Osteoclast Resorption Apparatuscall_made
Geblinger, D.; Zink, C.; Spencer, N. D.; Addadi, L.; Geiger, B., Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 2012, 9(72) pp 1599-1608. - external pageSystematic Study of Osteoblast Response to Nanotopography by means of Nanoparticle-Density Gradientscall_made
Künzler, T.; Huwiler, C.; Drobek, T.; Vörös, J.; Spencer, N. D., Biomaterials, 2007, 28(33) pp 5000-5006. - external pageFunctionalizable Nano-Morphology Gradients via Colloidal Self-Assemblycall_made
Huwiler, C.; Künzler, T.; Textor, M.; Vörös, J.; Spencer, N. D., Langmuir, 2007, 23(11) pp 5929-5935. - external pageSystematic Study of Osteoblast and Fibroblast Response to Roughness by means of Surface- Morphology Gradientscall_made
Künzler, T.; Drobek, T.; Schuler, M.; Spencer, N. D., Biomaterials, 2007, 28(13) pp 2175-2182.