Trevor Byrne

Quantifying Protein Adsorption on Combinatorial Metal Films: a High Throughput Approach Using Novel Ex-situ and In-situ Techniques with Electron Microprobe and Spectroscopic Ellipsometry Trevor Byrne

This book is a 2008 MSc thesis that presents new high throughput techniques for quantifying protein adsorption on metal surfaces. Using a materials synthesis approach developed at Dalhousie University, combinatorially sputtered Al-, Nb-, Ta-, and Ti-containing films were prepared and characterized. In order to test the metal surfaces for their protein affinity ex-situ, a calibration method was devised for wavelength-dispersive spectroscopy. Fibrinogen and albumin absorption amounts on each film were correlated to their compositional gradient and were directly compared to the adsorbed amounts obtained ex-situ using spectroscopic ellipsometry. A simple and novel flow cell design is also presented here for use with variable angle spectroscopic ellipsometry to study the adsorption of liquid-borne species in-situ. The flow cell allows a sample to be probed point by point and at any common ellipsometric angle of incidence, unlike other designs.