The potential of electropolymerized crosslinked PEGDMA coating on steel for further functionalization: Surface parameters and HMEC-1 cells attachment correlations

Recently we have proposed the electropolymerized coating for steel 316L obtained via our patented experimental set and here we provide the study concerning further functionalization of the coating with: 1) COOH groups resulting from acrylic acid in situ electropolymerization, and 2) grafting polymeric coating functionalized with COOH with adhesive peptide including REDV (arginine-glutamic acid-aspartic acid-valine) sequence. Bare steel and the materials with polymeric coating variants with and without REDV were then subjected to HMEC-1 (human dermal microvascular endothelial cells) culture. Surface of the materials were analysed in terms of roughness, wettability, and chemical composition with XPS. It was indicated that COOH content expectedly varied with concentration of acrylic acid used to the functionalization and that REDV grafting for each concentration was successful. We drawn correlations between adhered cells number and surface roughness parameters and contact angle values for each variant. Low contact angle representing hydrophilic character of the surface is beneficial for this type of materials. However, there is a synergistic effect of roughness, wettability, and chemical composition of the material on cells adhesion and one cannot be considered with omission of others. With increasing peptide concentration, wettability first decreases then increases so that optimal peptide content has to be determined.