Abstract
Protein micropatterning has become an important tool for many biomedical applications as well as in academic research. Current techniques that allow to reduce the feature size of patterns below 1 μm are, however, often costly and require sophisticated equipment. We present here a straightforward and convenient method to generate highly condensed nanopatterns of proteins without the need for clean room facilities or expensive equipment. Our approach is based on nanocontact printing and allows for the fabrication of protein patterns with feature sizes of 80 nm and periodicities down to 140 nm. This was made possible by the use of the material X-poly(dimethylsiloxane) (X-PDMS) in a two-layer stamp layout for protein printing. In a proof of principle, different proteins at various scales were printed and the pattern quality was evaluated by atomic force microscopy (AFM) and super-resolution fluorescence microscopy.
Highlights
In recent years, surfaces featuring micropatterns of biomolecules, proteins, have seen a surge of interest
To achieve high imprint quality and good long-term storability of the printed nanopatterns, we chose to functionalize the glass coverslips with Mix&Go R Biosensor, a polymer metal ion coating that does not react with water and allows strong attachment of proteins via avidity binding
atomic force microscopy (AFM) images of the BSA patterns printed with W80 revealed defect-free imprints, with an average height of the printed protein of ∼3 nm corresponding to a monolayer of BSA (Figures 2B,C)
Summary
Surfaces featuring micropatterns of biomolecules, proteins, have seen a surge of interest. They have found multiple applications in biomedical research such as microarrays (Macbeath and Schreiber, 2000; Allison et al, 2006; Wingren and Borrebaeck, 2007), proteomics (Haab, 2005; Wingren and Borrebaeck, 2008), and biomimetic sensors (Mujahid et al, 2013). One family of techniques is based on indirect deposition of proteins; the most prominent of these are photolithography (Christman et al, 2006; Lenci et al, 2011) and laser microablation (Nicolau et al, 2010), where the minimum feature sizes are set by the diffraction limit of light
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