Impact of engineered surface microtopography on biofilm formation of Staphylococcus aureus

Reduced bacterial adhesion on titanium surfaces micro-structured by ultra-short pulsed laser ablation

“…The detailed p-values are listed in Table 1. The reduced biofilm surface coverage is in line with findings from Chung et al [8]. They detected a similar effect for S. aureus on Sharklet™-structured PDMS surfaces.…”

“…Afterwards, their effectiveness was also proven for bacterial attachment [8][9][10][11][12]. The mechanism proposed to explain inhibition of algal spore attachment -the increasing of intracellular stress gradients due to cell contact with two geometrically different features [15] -cannot be used for explanation of reduced bacterial attachment.…”

“…The most plausible explanation is that this is related to the different materials used. Whereas S. aureus biofilm formation on PDMS typically takes 14 days [8], biofilm formation on titanium needs only several hours. This may influence the effectiveness of the Sharklet™-like micro-structured titanium.…”

“…It is inspired by the skin of fast-moving sharks and consists of diamondshaped, geometrically ordered micro-structures [7]. It was shown that Sharklet™ surfaces produced from poly-(dimethyl siloxane) elastomers (PDMS) reduce bacterial adhesion of Staphylococcus aureus, Staphylococcus epidermidis, Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Mycobacterium abscessus [8][9][10][11][12]. Moreover, the structure also decreases attachment of algal spores, blood platelets, endothelial and epithelial cells [11,13,14].…”

Progress of marine biofouling and antifouling technologies

“…It was proposed that the responses were governed by the same underlying thermodynamic principles as wettability [134]. The Sharklet AF surface was also tested with other organisms such as Staphylococcus aureus (Figures 9(b) and (c)) and appeared to have effective antifouling performance [135].…”