Inkjet-printed phospholipid bilayers on titanium oxide surfaces: towards functional membrane biointerfaces

Abstract

Functional biointerfaces hold broad significance for designing cell-responsive medical implants and sensor devices. Solid-supported phospholipid bilayers are a promising class of biological materials to build bioinspired thin-film coatings, as they can facilitate interactions with cell membranes. However, it remains challenging to fabricate lipid bilayers on medically relevant materials such as titanium oxide surfaces. There are also limitations in existing bilayer printing capabilities since most approaches are restricted to either deposition alone or to fixed microarray patterning. By combining advances in lipid surface chemistry and on-demand inkjet printing, we demonstrate the direct deposition and patterning of covalently tethered lipid bilayer membranes on titanium oxide surfaces, in ambient conditions and without any surface pretreatment process. The deposition conditions were evaluated by quartz crystal microbalance-dissipation (QCM-D) measurements, with corresponding resonance frequency (Δf) and energy dissipation (ΔD) shifts of around -25 Hz and 1 µm2/s diffusion coefficient), according to fluorescence recovery after photobleaching (FRAP) measurements. By taking advantage of the lipid bilayer patterned architectures and the unique features of titanium oxide's photoactivity, we further show how patterned cell culture arrays can be fabricated. Looking forward, this work presents new capabilities to achieve stable lipid bilayer patterns that can potentially be translated into implantable biomedical devices.Ministry of Education (MOE)Published versionThis work was supported by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Singapore under Grant AcRF TIER1-2020-T1-002-032 (RG111/20) and by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korean government (MSIT) (No. 2020R1C1C1004385). In addition, this work was supported by the International Research and Development Program of the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science and ICT (2020K1A3A1A39112724)