In the article “Gentle plasma process for embedded silver-nanowire flexible transparent electrodes on temperature-sensitive polymer substrates “ Lukas Kinner, Emil J W List-Kratochvil and Theodoros Dimopoulos investigate processing routes to obtain highly conductive and transparent electrodes of silver nanowires (AgNWs) on flexible polyethylene terephthalate (PET) substrate.*

Their study shows that both thermally stable polyimide, as well as temperature-sensitive PET can be used as flexible host substrates, combined with a gentle, AgNW plasma curing. This is possible by adjusting the fabrication sequence to accommodate the plasma curing step, depending on the host substrate. As a result, embedded AgNW electrodes, transferred from polyimide-to-PET and from PET-to-PET are obtained, with optical transmittance of ~80% (including the substrate) and sheet resistance of ~13 Ω/sq., similar to electrodes transferred from glass-to-glass substrates.*

The embedded AgNW electrodes on PET show superior performance in bending tests, as compared to indium-tin-oxide electrodes and can be easily combined with metal oxide films for device implementation. The introduced approach, involving low-cost flexible substrates, AgNW spray-coating and plasma curing, is compatible with high-throughput, roll-to-roll processing.*

The impact of the introduced processes concerns therefore applications where high-throughput production must be combined with sensitive, flexible substrates and ultra-thin device architectures, like OLEDs and organic- or perovskite-based photovoltaics.*

The sample surfaces were characterized with atomic force microscopy (AFM) in tapping mode, using high-resolution NANOSENSORS™ SuperSharpSilicon™ SSS-NCHR AFM probes.

*Lukas Kinner, Emil J W List-Kratochvil and Theodoros Dimopoulos
Gentle plasma process for embedded silver-nanowire flexible transparent electrodes on temperature-sensitive polymer substrates
Nanotechnology, Volume 31, Number 36 (2020)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6528/ab97aa

Please follow this external link to read the full article: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6528/ab97aa

Open Access: The article “Gentle plasma process for embedded silver-nanowire flexible transparent electrodes on temperature-sensitive polymer substrates” by Lukas Kinner, Emil J W List-Kratochvil and Theodoros Dimopoulos is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Surgery, particularly open surgery, is known to cause tissue/organ adhesion during healing. These adhesions occur through contact between the surgical treatment site and other organ, bone, or abdominal sites. Fibrous bands can form in unnecessary contact areas and cause various complications. Consequently, film- and gel-type anti-adhesion agents have been developed. The development of sustained drug delivery systems is very important for disease treatment and prevention.*

In “Development of a Lidocaine-Loaded Alginate/CMC/PEO Electrospun Nanofiber Film and Application as an Anti-Adhesion Barrier” Seungho Baek, Heekyung Park, Youngah Park, Hyun Kang and Donghyun Lee describe how the drug release behavior was controlled by crosslinking lidocaine-loaded alginate/carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC)/polyethylene oxide (PEO) nanofiber films prepared by electrospinning.*

Lidocaine is mainly used as an anesthetic and is known to have anti-adhesion effects.*

Based on the results presented in the article, this study shows that the drug release behavior can be controlled by using CaCl2 as a nontoxic crosslinking agent to produce a good anti-adhesion barrier that can prevent unnecessary tissue adhesion at a surgical site.*

The authors selected atomic force microscopy (AFM) using NANOSENSORS™ PointProbe® Plus PPP-NCHR AFM cantilevers to analyze the electrospun films.*

*Seungho Baek, Heekyung Park, Youngah Park, Hyun Kang and Donghyun Lee
Development of a Lidocaine-Loaded Alginate/CMC/PEO Electrospun Nanofiber Film and Application as an Anti-Adhesion Barrier
Polymers 2020, 12(3), 618
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/polym12030618

Please follow this external link to read the full article: https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4360/12/3/618/htm

Open Access: The article “Development of a Lidocaine-Loaded Alginate/CMC/PEO Electrospun Nanofiber Film and Application as an Anti-Adhesion Barrier” by Seungho Baek, Heekyung Park, Youngah Park, Hyun Kang and Donghyun Lee is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Correlating data from different microscopy techniques holds the potential to discover new facets of signalling events in cellular biology.*

In the article “Simultaneous co-localized super-resolution fluorescence microscopy and atomic force microscopy: combined SIM and AFM platform for the life sciences” Ana I. Gómez-Varela, Dimitar R. Stamov, Adelaide Miranda, Rosana Alves, Cláudia Barata-Antunes, Daphné Dambournet, David G. Drubin, Sandra Paiva and Pieter A. A. De Beule report for the first time a hardware set-up capable of achieving simultaneous co-localized imaging of spatially correlated far-field super-resolution fluorescence microscopy and atomic force microscopy, a feat only obtained until now by fluorescence microscopy set-ups with spatial resolution restricted by the Abbe diffraction limit.*

The authors detail system integration and demonstrate system performance using sub-resolution fluorescent beads and applied to a test sample consisting of human bone osteosarcoma epithelial cells, with plasma membrane transporter 1 (MCT1) tagged with an enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP) at the N-terminal.*

The simultaneous operation of AFM and super-resolution fluorescence microscopy technique provides a powerful observational tool on the nanoscale, albeit data acquisition is typically obstructed by a series of integration problems. The authors of the above-mentioned article believe that the combination of SR-SIM with AFM presents one of the most promising schemes enabling simultaneous co-localized imaging, allowing the recording of nanomechanical data and cellular dynamics visualization at the same time.*

For measurements on cells in liquid NANOSENSORS™ uniqprobe qp-BioAC-CI AFM probes ( CB1 ) with a nominal resonance frequency of 90 kHz (in air), spring constant of 0.3 Nm−1, partial gold coating on the detector side, and quartz-like circular symmetric hyperbolic (double-concaved) tips with ROC of 30 nm were used. The corresponding AFM areas for the cell images were acquired with a Z-cantilever velocity of 250 μms−1 at a max Z-length of 1.5 μm, resulting in an acquisition time (based on the number of pixels) for Figs. 2, 3, 4 of ca. 13, 8 and 15 min respectively.*

*Ana I. Gómez-Varela, Dimitar R. Stamov, Adelaide Miranda, Rosana Alves, Cláudia Barata-Antunes, Daphné Dambournet, David G. Drubin, Sandra Paiva and Pieter A. A. De Beule
Simultaneous co-localized super-resolution fluorescence microscopy and atomic force microscopy: combined SIM and AFM platform for the life sciences
Nature Scientific Reports volume 10, Article number: 1122 (2020)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-57885-z

Please follow this external link to read the full article https://rdcu.be/b4Iot

Open Access: The article “Simultaneous co-localized super-resolution fluorescence microscopy and atomic force microscopy: combined SIM and AFM platform for the life sciences” by Ana I. Gómez-Varela, Dimitar R. Stamov, Adelaide Miranda, Rosana Alves, Cláudia Barata-Antunes, Daphné Dambournet, David G. Drubin, Sandra Paiva and Pieter A. A. De Beule is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.