Materials are initially tested as micron-scale polymer spots printed using metal pins


High performance materials are subsequently scaled up for further biological testing


“We’re interested in exploring other market sectors and understanding the mechanism of bacterial response to the materials”


begun,” says Alexander. “We’re interested in exploring other market


sectors and


understanding the mechanism of bacterial response to the materials.” When bacteria grow in biofilms, they are 1000 times more


resistant to antibiotic


treatment and to the host immune system, so when they form on medical devices they can pose serious health risks. One of the first


steps in biofilm formation is when


bacteria attach to a surface. “We wanted to find a material properties bacterial


to resist


that had the surface this


initial attachment,” to screen stage of says Dr Andrew


Hook, a member of the Nottingham team. “We used our high-throughput platform technology relevant


three bacterial strains: www.projectsmagazine.eu.com clinically Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Staphylococcus aureas and


Escherichia coli. These bacteria were transformed to express green fluorescent protein, allowing us


to rapidly quantify


how much bacteria was on each polymer and quickly identify which of these polymers were


the most resistant to


bacterial attachment.” In addition to the Nature Biotech paper,


the researchers published an expansion of their work


in an Advanced Materials


publication at the beginning of 2013. This involved screening every single one of the 116 commercially available acrylate monomers (the polymer microarray system they use is based upon acrylate chemistry), providing the maximum chemical diversity possible to start off with. “That was our


first generation screen,” explains Hook, “and from there we selected monomers to continue


investigating. The second


generation assay explored the combinatorial possibilities of these monomers by looking at different mixtures of


third generation explored hits from this second generation array, trying out various ratios of the monomers in order to find the optimum composition for resisting bacterial attachment.” The materials the researchers were left


with after the third generation screen were somewhat surprising, a complete departure from what they could have predicted based upon previous work in the subject. One particular class of materials that had been shown to perform excellently were then


59 them, while the


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