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Bio-inspired Materials

Klaus Rischka - Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Technology and Advanced Materials (IFAM)

The nature is a potential source of ideas for the development of new materials like adhesives and coatings. It is, however, a huge challenge to adapt these solutions to technical and medical applications – a challenge which is chiefly about optimizing the interactions between the organic and inorganic components.

Special attention is put on the interface between inorganic materials – e.g. metal, plastic, glass, ceramic or oxide layer – and the organic biomatter.

Proteins are a special group of biomatter. They are consisted of different amino acids. The synthesis of (small) fragments of the proteins, called peptides, is an approach to mimic the desired function of the protein. By the combination of peptides and proteins with synthetic polymers new materials with technical interesting properties are created.

The topics of the course will give a brief introduction into proteins and their functions in nature. Additionally the chemical concepts of peptide synthesis will be discussed. The functionalization principles of surfaces and synthetic polymers with biomolecules and peptides will be demonstrated behind the background of bio-inspired materials. Typical examples will be both antimicrobial and anti-freeze coatings and mussel based adhesives. Different characterization methods for modified surfaces and polymers will be presented like IR-spectroscopy, MALDI-MS and fluorescence microscopy.

In two lab courses the students will have the opportunity to modify two different surfaces. In the first course on a gold coated surface Cysteine shall be immobilized by dip-coating. The obtained modified surface will be characterized by IR-spectroscopy. In the second course an aluminium surface will be coated with an amino-silan. The success of the coating will be controlled by fluorescence microscopy. For this purpose the amino-layer will be stained by Fluoresceinisothiocyanate (Fitc).

Abstract Rischka