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There is an urgent need for improved models for cardiotoxicity testing. Here we propose acoustic sensing applied to beating human cardiomyocyte clusters for non-invasive, surrogate measuring of the QT interval and other characteristics of the contractile machinery. In experiments with the acoustic method quartz crystal microbalance with dissipation monitoring (QCM-D), the shape of the recorded signals was very similar to the extracellular field potential detected in electrochemical experiments, and the expected changes of the QT interval in response to addition of conventional drugs (E-4031 or nifedipine) were observed. Additionally, changes in the dissipation signal upon addition of cytochalasin D were in good agreement with the known, corresponding shortening of the contraction-relaxation time. These findings suggest that QCM-D has great potential as a tool for cardiotoxicological screening, where effects of compounds on the cardiomyocyte contractile machinery can be detected independently of whether the extracellular field potential is altered or not., CC BY 4.0

This paper presents results of several years of experimental and theoretical work on a library of oligo(ethylene glycol)-containing self-assembled monolayers (OEG SAMs) on gold. The library consists of 15 different thiol compounds, which all contain alkyl and OEG portions of different length, as well as amide moieties forming a stabilizing lateral hydrogen bonding network. We have investigated the quality, conformation, orientation, defect structure and infrared (IR) signatures of these OEG SAMs prepared by spontaneous adsorption from dilute Solutions. It is shown that solution concentration and incubation time are important factors to obtain high quality SAMs, in particular for those containing long OEG chains. Further on, the thiol compounds should contain a sufficiently long alkyl spacer to provide in plane van der Waals interactions strong enough to govern the formation of a densely packed alkylthiolate overlayer on the Au(1 1 1) surface. Such a highly ordered alkyl support, which is additionally stabilized by the lateral hydrogen bonds, enables us to vary the length of the terminal OEG portion from 1 to at least 12, without affecting the integrity and conformational characteristics of the supporting (alkyl) part of the SAM. Also, we discuss the importance of appropriate modeling tools to advance the understanding of IR signatures of the OEG SAMs. Finally, we demonstrate the generality of our "modular approach" by analyzing the structure of OEG SAMs formed by compounds extended with an additional terminal amide and an alkyl tail. Thus, the SAMs discussed herein provide an attractive platform for construction of advanced nanoarchitectures on surfaces, not only limited to biomaterials and fouling applications. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Electrochemical (EC) quartz crystal microbalance with dissipation monitoring (ECQCM-D) is a new and powerful technique for the in situ study of adsorption phenomena. e.g., as a function of the potential of the substrate. When titanium Ti) is employed as the substrate, its oxidation behavior needs to be taken into account. Ti is always covered with a native oxide layer that can grow by, e.g., thermal oxidation or under anodic polarization. For biomolecular adsorption studies on oxidized Ti under applied potential, a stable oxide layer is desired in order to be able to distinguish the adsorption studies on oxidized Ti under applied potenital, a stable oxide layer is desired in order to be able to distinguish the adsorption phenomena and the oxide growth. Therefore, the oxidation of thermally evaporated Ti films was investigated in phosphate buffered saline by means of ECOCM-d, using a specially designed EC flow cell Upon stepping the potential applied to Ti up to 2.6 V vs standard hydrogen electrode (SHE), a fast increase of the mass was observed initially for each potential step evolving slowly to an asymptotic mass change after several hours. The oxide layer thickness increased as a quasi-linear function of the oxidation potential for potential up to 1.8 V vs SHE. The composition of the oxide layer was analyzed by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) it was mainly composed of TiO2 with a small percentage of suboxides (TiO and Ti2O3) primarily at the inner metal/oxide interface. The amount composed of TiO2, with a small percentage of suboxides TiO and Ti2O3 decreased with increasing oxidation potential. For each oxidation potential the calculated thickness obtained from ECQCM-D correlated well with the thickness obtained by XPS depth profiling. A procedure to prepare Ti samples with a stable oxide layer was successfully established for investigations on the influence of an electric field on the adsorption of biomolecules. As such, the effect of an applied potential

This article summarizes our most recent contributions to the rapidly growing field of supported lipid assemblies with emphasis on current studies addressing both fundamental and applied aspects of supported lipid bilayer (SLB) and tethered lipid vesicles (TLVs) to be utilized in sensing applications. The new insights obtained from combining the quartz crystal microbalance with dissipation monitoring technique with surface plasmon resonance are described, and we also present recent studies in which nanoplasmonic sensing has been used in studies of SLBs and TLVs. To gain full control over the spatial arrangement of TLVs in both two and three dimensions, we have developed a method for site-selective and sequence-specific sorting of DNA-tagged vesicles to surfaces modified with complementary DNA. The combination of this method with nanoplasmonic sensing formats is covered as well as the possibility of using DNA-modified vesicles for the detection of unlabeled DNA targets on the single-molecule level. Finally, a new method for membrane fusion induced by hybridization of vesicle-anchored DNA is demonstrated, including new results on content mixing obtained with vesicle populations encapsulating short, complementary DNA strands.