Bacterial adhesion to polyvinylamine-modified nanocellulose films

Cellulose nanofibril (CNF) materials have been widely studied in recent years and are suggested for a wide range of applications, e.g., medical and hygiene products. One property not very well studied is the interaction between bacteria and these materials and how this can be controlled. The current work studies how bacteria adhere to different CNF materials modified with polyelectrolyte multilayers. The tested materials were TEMPO-oxidized to have different surface charges, periodate-oxidized to vary the water interaction and hot-pressed to alter the surface structure. Then, multilayers were constructed using polyvinylamine (PVAm) and polyacrylic acid. Both the material surface charge and water interaction affect the amount of polymer adsorbed to the surfaces. Increasing the surface charge decreases the adsorption after the first PVAm layer, possibly due to conformational changes. Periodate-oxidized and crosslinked films have low initial polymer adsorptions; the decreased swelling prevents polymer diffusion into the CNF micropore structure. Microscopic analysis after incubating the samples with bacterial suspensions show that only the materials with the lowest surface charge enable bacteria to adhere to the surface because, when adsorbing up to 5 layers PVAm/PAA, the increased anionic surface charge appears to decrease the net surface charge. Both the amounts of PVAm and PAA influence the net surface charge and thus the bacterial adhesion. The structure generated by the hot-pressing of the films also strongly increases the number of bacteria adhering to the surfaces. These results indicate that the bacterial adhesion to CNF materials can be tailored using polyelectrolyte multilayers on different CNF substrates.