DR. ANTON MANAKHOV

Electrospinning is a highly versatile method that, through processing of polymeric solutions or melts, produces fibers with diameters ranging from a few microns to tens of nanometres. Flexible substrates made of micro and nano-fibers with high surface areas find practical bioapplications as scaffolds for tissue engineering. However, such application requires modification of polymer surfaces in order to facilitate cell adhesion.

Electrospun polycaprolactone (PCL) fibers will be modified by plasma deposited thin films containing biologically active functional groups, namely amine and carboxyl groups. Plasmachemical modifications of fibrous PCL in low pressure radio frequency discharges will be designed to achieve deeper understanding of the interaction of reactive plasmas with fibrous materials and to find correlations between the substrate structure, properties of the films and, consequently, interaction of proteins and cells with the prepared composites. Efficient plasmachemical processes will be also developed for the discharges at atmospheric pressure that are more easily adopted for a use in industrial production lines. Part of the project is devoted to the development of an improved technique for selective quantification of surface amine groups.