Investigation of the potential of dipping as a technology for bifunctional assemblies as a coating material

The biologicalisation of production represents an innovative approach to increase sustainability and efficiency, as well as improve the functionality of existing products and processes by incorporating bio-based materials into production. One area of biologicalisation of production involves the use of customized proteins for surface functionalization. The potential functionalities that can be achieved are diverse. For example, customized proteins have the potential to achieve antibacterial and anticorrosive functions. The resulting potentials can be utilized, for instance, in medicine and production technology. However, currently, there is a lack of fundamental knowledge regarding the application of customized proteins as bio-based coating materials for various conventional materials. This leads to new challenges for research and industry. Technologies for the scalable processing and application of bio-based materials such as bifunctional assemblies have not been sufficiently investigated yet. For the application of bifunctional assemblies for coating surfaces, coating technologies have been identified in the past, which are potentially capable of applying customized proteins as coatings to ensure individual functionalities. One of the identified coating technologies with high potential is dipping. The aim of this work is to present the results of initial investigations on the coating of different base materials with the fluorescent bifunctional assembly eGFP-LCI. The fluorescent bifunctional assembly was used because by measuring the fluorescence, an evaluation of the adhesion and based on that, the identification of possible cause-effect relationships in the coating of different materials with tailored bifunctional assemblies is possible. The findings from this series of experiments show that with increasing dipping duration, peptide concentration, and surface roughness of the workpiece cause an increase of the coating quality of PLA. While for other investigated materials, the observations did not apply. These fundamentals are essential for identifying further influencing factors and processability in the dipping process for bifunctional assemblies in production technology for common materials.