A new anti-biofilm strategy of enabling arbitrary surfaces of materials and devices with robust bacterial anti-adhesion via a spraying modified microsphere method

Despite adopting diverse strategies and fabrication methods to prevent biofilm formation, the existing sophisticated fabrication methods for sole wettable or smart surfaces and their unsatisfactory anti-adhesive durability need to be improved for their practical applications. In this study, a new anti-biofilm strategy via spraying bacterially-anti-adhesive modified polystyrene (MPS)/Ag microspheres was proposed to construct two kinds of bacterially-anti-adhesive surfaces with tunable wettability to meet different requirements in various fields. These surfaces could be constructed on arbitrary surfaces of materials and devices by this facile spray-coating method. A hydrophilic-type surface was demonstrated to possess superior antibacterial and bacterially-anti-adhesive capabilities. More importantly, its bacterially-anti-adhesive mechanism was first illustrated by molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of the resisting effect of the hydrated layer. These surfaces could be easily converted to hydrophobic-type surfaces with significantly enhanced bacterially-anti-adhesive properties. It is worth noting that underwater oleophobicity was first deemed to be a vital factor for bacterial anti-adhesion due to the lotus-like repelling effect, in addition to the outstanding self-cleaning properties and repellency of surfaces for various bacterial media. The contact/release-killing synergistic antibacterial model and resisting and repelling bacterially-anti-adhesive model were, thus, substantially elucidated. Importantly, these surfaces demonstrated an outstanding durable and robust resistance to mechanical damage and chemical attack. This fabrication method is expected to be flexibly applied to arbitrary substrates in practical fields.