Elkasabi Yaseen, Lahann Joerg
Departments of Chemical Engineering, Material Science and Engineering, and Macromolecular Science and Engineering, University of Michigan, 2300 Hayward Street, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109, USA.
Macromol Rapid Commun. 2009 Jan 2;30(1):57-63. doi: 10.1002/marc.200800578. Epub 2008 Dec 2.
Chemical vapor deposition (CVD) co-polymerization was used to fabricate polymer coatings, which comprise of reactive surface composition gradients. Two functionalized derivatives of [2.2]paracyclophane were fed into a two-source CVD system at a 180 ° angle, then copolymerized and deposited as a polymer gradient. Infrared and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) confirmed the compositional changes within the bulk polymer and at the surface. By manipulating process parameters, gradients of tailored compositional slope can be deposited on a wide range of substrates. We also were able to selectively immobilize fluorescence-labeled ligands onto the reactive polymer gradients, making CVD-based gradient surfaces a flexible platform for fabricating biomolecular substrates.
