Functional Nanostructured Porous Si/Hydrogel Hybrids: Synthesis, Characterization and Applications
- PDF / 1,290,495 Bytes
- 6 Pages / 432 x 648 pts Page_size
- 81 Downloads / 257 Views
Functional Nanostructured Porous Si/Hydrogel Hybrids: Synthesis, Characterization and Applications Ester Segal1,2, Naama Massad-Ivanir1, Giorgi Shtenberg3 and Maksym Krepker1 1
Department of Biotechnology and Food Engineering, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 32000, Israel 2 The Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 32000, Israel 3 The Interdepartmental Program of Biotechnology, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 32000, Israel ABSTRACT Porous Si/hydrogel thin films combine a porous Si optical nanostructure and a functional hydrogel. These hybrids show great promise as versatile platforms for the fabrication of miniaturized sensors with various transduction mechanisms, cell culture supports, autonomous drug delivery systems, and many other functional systems. The basic considerations in designing functional PSi/hydrogel hybrids, synthesis routes, and novel characterization methods are discussed. New exciting applications of these nanomaterials as label-free optical biosensing platforms for bacteria and organophosphates detection are described. INTRODUCTION Porous Si (PSi) or SiO2 matrices have emerged as attractive and versatile materials for the construction of complex functional nanostructures. These inorganic scaffolds provide a unique nano-scale host template for the incorporation of polymeric materials. The incorporation of designed polymers with nanostructured inorganic scaffolds opens opportunities to engineer advanced materials with highly tunable properties e.g., mechanical, chemical, optical, and electrical properties. Moreover, these materials can be easily designed to change their properties and function in response to external triggers, making them attractive for use in lab-on-chip systems, drug delivery, biosensing, and many other functional systems [1]. Specifically, the incorporation of hydrogels offers significant advantages due to their responsive behavior (volumetric changes) to different surrounding environments, ability to store and immobilize reactive functional groups, high optical transparency, and biological compatibility. Our work focuses on the design and synthesis of functional nanostructured PSi/hydrogel hybrids, and their application as sensors [2,3], biosensors [4,5], and drug delivery vehicles. This work describes the basic considerations in designing functional PSi/hydrogel hybrids, synthesis routes, characterization methods, and new exciting applications of these nanomaterials as biosensors for a wide range of targets. Two types of hybrids are presented PSi/poly(acrylamide) and PSi/poly(2-[dimethylamino]ethyl methacrylate) (poly(DMAEMA)) and their application as label-free optical biosensors for rapid detection of bacteria and organophosphates (OPs), respectively. These hybrids combine an oxidized PSi (PSiO2) optical nanostructure, a FabryPérot thin film, used as the optical transducer element and the hydrogel. The hydrogel is synthesized in situ within the inorganic template and conjugated with an app
Data Loading...
