Production of CaCO3/hyperbranched polyglycidol hybrid films using spray-coating technique.

Biomineralizing organisms employ macromolecules and cellular processing strategies in order to produce highly complex composite materials such as nacre. Bionic approaches translating this knowledge into viable technical production schemes for a large-scale production of biomimetic hybrid materials have met with limited success so far. Investigations presented here thus focus on the production of CaCO(3)/polymer hybrid coatings that can be applied to huge surface areas via reactive spray-coating.

Shear free and blotless cryo-TEM imaging: a new method for probing early evolution of nanostructures.

Cryogenic transmission electron microscopy (cryo-TEM) is a powerful method to image native state morphologies of nanoscale soft and hard objects suspended in solvents. Sample preparation is a critical step toward producing images at length and time scales of interest. We demonstrate a nearly shear-free sample thinning method which simultaneously allows imaging of evolving nanostructures at subsecond time scales.

Design of chemically activated polymer microwells by one-step UV-lithography for stem cell adhesion.

A novel method to produce sub-microwalled chemically activated polymer microwells by one-step UV-lithography under ambient conditions which are selectively coated with gelatin is introduced. The dimensions as well as the shape of the resulting polystyrene structures are both tunable merely by the irradiation time through one and the same mask. It is shown that the UV-irradiation initiates three effects at those surface areas which are not covered by the mask: (i) oxidation, (ii) cross-linking, and (iii) degradation of polystyrene.