BACKGROUND Escherichia coli is one of the best studied microorganisms and finds multiple applications especially as tool in the heterologous production of interesting proteins of other organisms. The heterologous expression of special surface (S-) layer proteins caused the formation of extremely long E. coli cells which leave transparent tubes when they divide into single E. coli cells. Such na...

Reconstruction of extracellular matrix substrates for delivery of functional photoreceptors is crucial in pathologies such as retinal degeneration and age-related macular degeneration. In this study, we assembled polyelectrolyte films using the layer-by-layer deposition method. The buildup of three different films composed of poly(L-lysine)/chondroitin sulfate (PLL/CSA), poly(L-lysine)/poly(sty...

Closure systems for personnel protection applications, such as protective clothing or respirator face seals, should provide effective permeation barrier to toxic gases. Currently available mechanical closure systems based on the hook and loop types (example, Velcro) do not provide adequate barrier to gas permeation. To achieve hermetic sealing, we propose a nonmechanical, nanoscopic molecular c...

The formation of polyelectrolyte complexes between carboxymethylcellulose and N-methylated poly(2-vinylpyridine), at a nonstoichiometric mixing ratio, was studied. Various methods, such as viscometry, turbidimetry, electrophoresis, and optical spectroscopy, were used to investigate the complexes with respect to their composition, structure, and stability in aqueous systems of different ionic st...

Using dissipative particle dynamics (DPD), we model the interfacial adsorption of pH-responsive polyelectrolytes and polyelectrolyte-grafted nanoparticles (PNPs) at a planar water-oil interface. The electrostatic interactions in the presence of the dielectric discontinuity across the interface are modeled by exploiting the Groot method, which uses an iterative method to solve the Poisson equati...

The energetic and entropic interactions governing the attraction between like-charged colloidal particles grafted with oppositely charged polyelectrolyte chains in a monovalent electrolyte are investigated computationally. We employ coarse-grained models of the colloids with varying surface and polyelectrolyte charges and Monte Carlo simulations to compute the potential of mean force between tw...

Light scattering and pH titration were used to examine the binding of bovine serum albumin (BSA) to poly(diallyldimethylammonium chloride) (PDADMAC), poly(acrylamidomethylpropyl sulfonate) (PAMPS), poly(methacrylamidopropyltrimethylammonium chloride) (PMAPTAC), and an AMPS-acrylamide random copolymer (PAMPS80AAm20). The critical protein charge required to induce protein-polyelectrolyte complexa...

We derive the general expression for diffusiophoretic mobility of a soft particle (i.e., polyelectrolyte-coated hard particle) in concentration gradient electrolytes case which particle’s core size is large enough compared with Debye length. Therefore, surface can be regarded as planar, and electrolyte parallel to surface. The obtained applied arbitrary values fixed charge density polyelectroly...

We applied shear force microscopy, an analog to attractive-mode atomic force microscopy, and near-field scanning optical microscopy (NSOM) to the study of surface roughness and nanoscale morphology in polyelectrolyte self-assembled layers. Our data show that the surface roughness of multilayer films on glass grows linearly with the number of polyelectrolyte bilayers for the first 10 bilayers, a...