Issue 5, 2020

A nature-inspired protective coating on soft/wet biomaterials for SEM by aerobic oxidation of polyphenols

Abstract

Phenolamine networks are one of the major structural components in the insect exoskeletons called cuticles. An insect cuticle-inspired surface protective coating named “aerobic oxidation of polyphenol leading to artificial exoskeleton”, APPLE, is reported. The coating layer can be formed on any solid surface, because the oxygen in the air triggers the formation of the APPLE coating. The oxidized pyrogallol, called pyrogallol-quinone, is rapidly reacted with polyamine to form mechanically robust organic thin film networks. As some insect cuticles can be directly imaged under extreme conditions, such as in the vacuum chamber of a scanning electron microscope (SEM) without conventional metal deposition, the surface morphology of APPLE-coated materials (particularly soft ones) can also be imaged by SEM without conventional metal deposition. The APPLE coating is a pure organic flexible layer which is formed within a couple of minutes. Another advantage of the APPLE layer is the suppression of the vapor gas emission from the soft materials, allowing SEM imaging of wet samples such as hydrogels and living tissues. Considering that the traditional studies of phenolic molecules focus mostly on surface functionalization, our study opens a new research direction in which such phenolic coatings might be useful for applications in extreme conditions.

Graphical abstract: A nature-inspired protective coating on soft/wet biomaterials for SEM by aerobic oxidation of polyphenols

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Communication
Submitted
12 Sep 2019
Accepted
23 Jan 2020
First published
03 Feb 2020
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY-NC license

Mater. Horiz., 2020,7, 1387-1396

A nature-inspired protective coating on soft/wet biomaterials for SEM by aerobic oxidation of polyphenols

H. K. Park, D. Lee, H. Lee and S. Hong, Mater. Horiz., 2020, 7, 1387 DOI: 10.1039/C9MH01448A

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications, without requesting further permission from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given and it is not used for commercial purposes.

To request permission to reproduce material from this article in a commercial publication, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party commercial publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements