Amine functionalized plasma polymerized PEG film: Elimination of non-specific binding for biosensing

Biosensors currently suffer from severe non-specific adsorption of proteins, which causes false positive errors in detection through overestimation of the affinity value. Overcoming this technical issue motivates our research. Polyethylene glycol (PEG) is well known for its ability to reduce the adsorption of biomolecules; hence, it is widely used in various areas of medicine and other biological fields. Likewise, amine functionalized surfaces are widely used for biochemical analysis, drug delivery, medical diagnostics and high throughput screening such as biochips. As a result, many coating techniques have been introduced, one of which is plasma polymerization - a powerful coating method due to its uniformity, homogeneity, mechanical and chemical stability, and excellent adhesion to any substrate. In our previous works, we successfully fabricated plasmapolymerized PEG (PP-PEG) films [1] and amine functionalized films [2] using the plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) technique. In this research, an amine functionalized PP-PEG film was fabricated by using the plasma co-polymerization technique with PEG 200 and ethylenediamine (EDA) as co-precursors. A biocompatible amine functionalized film was surface characterized by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR). The density of the surface amine functional groups was carried out by quantitative analysis using UV-visible spectroscopy. We found through surface plasmon resonance (SPR) analysis that non-specific protein adsorption was drastically reduced on amine functionalized PP-PEG films. Our functionalized PP-PEG films show considerable potential for biotechnological applications such as biosensors.