Site-selective biofunctionalization of aluminum nitride surfaces using patterned organosilane self-assembled...

Surface biochemical functionalization of group-III nitride semiconductors has recently attracted much interest because of their biocompatibility, nontoxicity, and long-term chemical stability under demanding physiochemical conditions for chemical and biological sensing. Among III-nitrides, aluminum nitride (AlN) and aluminum gallium nitride (AlGaN) are particularly important because they are often used as the sensing surfaces for sensors based on field-effect transistor or surface acoustic wave (SAW) sensor structures. To demonstrate the possibility of site-selective biofunctionalization on AlN surfaces, we have fabricated two-dimensional antibody micropatterns on AlN surfaces by using patterned self-assembled monolayer (SAM) templates. Patterned SAM templates are composed of two types of organosilane molecules terminated with different functional groups (amino and methyl), which were fabricated on AlN/sapphire substrates by combining photolithography, lift-off process, and self-assembly technique. Because the patterned SAM templates have different surface properties on the same surface, clear imaging contrast of SAM micropatterns can be observed by field-emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM) operating at a low accelerating voltage in the range of 0.5-1.5 kV. Furthermore, the contrast in surface potential of the binary SAM microstructures was confirmed by selective adsorption of negatively charged colloidal gold nanoparticles (AuNPs). The immobilization of AuNPs was limited on the positively charged amino-terminated regions, while they were scarcely found on the surface regions terminated by methyl groups. In this work, selective immobilization of green fluorescent protein (GFP) antibodies was demonstrated by the specific protein binding of enhanced GFP (EGFP) labeling. The observed strong fluorescent signal from antibody functionalized regions on the SAM-patterned AlN surface indicates the retained biological activity of specific molecular recognition resulting from the antibody-EGFP interaction. The results reported here show that micropatterning of organosilane SAMs by the combination of photolithographic process and lift-off technique is a practical approach for the fabrication of reaction regions on AlN-based bioanalytical microdevices.