Team:Groningen/Applications

From 2010.igem.org

Applications

Hydrophobic coatings

The potential benefits of hydrophobic coatings can be put to use in a wide variety of application areas, such as hydrophobic clothes, anti-fouling coatings, anti-corrosion coatings on different materials such as wood or concrete, hydrophobic paint or medical coatings for drug delivery or against biofilm formation. A lot of these kind of coatings have been developed, at least partially, in the lab. But not all coatings have been put into use succesfully outside the lab, so the search for a cheap, multi-usable hydrophobic coating is still on.

Next to hydrophobic coatings, a number of coatings which make use of different coating properties can be replaced by a good hydrophobic coating: For example anti-fouling coatings used on ships, now making use of damaging alloys to keep micro-organisms from adhering to the hull of the ship, could make use of hydrophobic coatings to not only prevent corrosion but also micro-organism fouling:

When marine micro-organisms like algea or poks adhere to the hull of ships, they form a layer which greatly increases drag in the water. This results in higher fuel costs and increased erosion. To prevent organisms to adhere to the hull of ships, chemical antifouling paints which often contain copper and tin are used. A lot of these chemicals eventually end up in the oceans ecosystems accumulating in all trophic levels of marine life and contaminating estuarial silt near shipping routes. Estimates show that in the Netherlands alone, approximately 19 tons of organotin and 30 tons of copper end up in the environment every year.

Although a biofilm is not ideal for all of these coating purposes (imagine a biofilm jacket), an actual hydrophobic biofilm coating could be applied in a fields ranging from anti-fouling coatings on ships, peers or buoys to coatings used to protect catheters, protheses from pathogenic biofilm formation. Moreover, with introducing our kill switch and our chaplin coating without living bacteria, a even broader range of applications can be taken into consideration as certain ethicial and safety issues are dealth with.

Biofilm coating

The main advantage of a biofilm coating is that it is very cheap, applying it requires no technical pinacles and it is more environmentally friendly than a certain chemical coatings. Next to that, biofilms can grow on a wide variety of surfaces: They are found on your teeth, in catheters, in plumming, in water cleaning instalations (beneficial), in bioreactors, and of course on your bathroom floor (blech).

So far there have been coatings with biological substances, but bacteria where only used to produce the coating material. In our project the bacteria will form a biofilm on the desired surface which will then function as a coating. Our bacteria therefore execute the coating process themselves, which could save a lot of effort. In the case of using chaplins as a material for hydrophobic coating, the biofilm is also be used to orient and anchor the proteins in the right way. As chaplins are amphipathic, the orientation in their pure form is determined by the properties of the surface they coat as well: Using a biofilm to structure them the right way is a easy and smart solution that helps us get round some problems of using the isolated chaplins as a coating.

Medical coatings

Dispersants