Lotus-leaf-inspired hierarchical structured surface with non-fouling and mechanical bactericidal performances

By Rujian Jiang, L. Hao, Lingjie Song, Limei Tian, Yong Fan, Jie Zhao, Chaozong Liu, W. Ming, L. Ren. Chemical Engineering Journal, 2020

237 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Antibiotics, a power tool to combat pathogenic bacterial infection, have experienced their inability to kill drug-resistant bacteria due to the development of antibiotic resistance. As an alternative, nanostructured, mechanical bactericidal surfaces may hold promise in killing bacteria without triggering antimicrobial resistance; however, accumulation of dead bacteria would greatly reduce their antimicrobial activity. In this study, for the first time we report a surprising discovery that the lotus leaf, well known for its superhydrophobicity, has demonstrated not only strong repelling effect against bacteria but also bactericidal activity via a cell-rupturing mechanism. Inspired by this unexpected finding, we subsequently designed and prepared a hierarchically structured surface, which was rendered superhydrophobic (water contact angle: 174°; roll-off angle: 99%) were repelled from the surface (non-fouling), those tenacious bacteria that managed to be in touch of the surface were physically killed completely. Compared to a conventional superhydrophobic surface (non-fouling to some extent, but no bacteria-killing) or a mechanical bactericidal surface (bacteria-killing but not bacteria-repelling), our new structured surface has the great advantage in maintaining long-term effectiveness in antimicrobial activity based entirely on physical mechanism.

Subfields: Computational Mechanics, Surfaces, Coatings and Films

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d224ed01104ed4dee5ca0503a3bbfaabc9a0680a