Immobilization of Silk Fibroin as Scaffold for Cell Culture by Plasma Grafting Polymerization

According to the low efficiency of cell attachment and proliferation on commercial polystyrene (PS) dish, scaffold with porous structure on the polystyrene dish is required to improve the cell attachment and proliferation efficiency on the dish. The scaffold with porous structure was fabricated from a solution of powdered silk fibroin by plasma grafting polymerization technique. Argon plasma was utilized by a 13.56 MHz capacitively coupled discharge (CCP) reactor at working pressure of 100 mTorr. Rf power, plasma treatment time, and the cycle of grafting on the dish were varied. The proper treatment time and rf power set to 10 minutes and 100 W, respectively. The experimental results showed the uniformly and highly distributed of porosity of fibroin scaffold on the PS dish surface. The Ar-treated dish had lower UV-Vis absorbance than the untreated dish indicating the efficiency of grafting between fibroin structure and treated PS surface is better than the untreated surface. The absorbance spectra of phanyalanine at 280 nm affirmed the success of the fibroin amino acid grafting to PS aromatic structure.