Organosilane Chemical Gradients: Progress, Properties, and Promise

Chemical gradients play an important role in nature, driving many different phenomena critical to life, including the transport of chemical species across membranes and the transport, attachment, and assembly of cells. Taking a cue from these natural processes, scientists and engineers are now working to develop synthetic chemical gradients for use in a broad range of applications, such as in high-throughput investigations of surface properties, as means to guide the motions and/or assembly of liquid droplets, vesicles, nanoparticles, and cells and as new media for stationary-phase-gradient chemical separations. Our groups have been working to develop new methods for preparing chemical gradients from organoalkoxysilane and organochlorosilane precursors and to obtain a better understanding of their properties on macroscopic to microscopic length scales. This review highlights our recent work on the development of controlled-rate infusion and infusion-withdrawal dip-coating methods for the preparation of gradients on planar glass and silicon substrates, on thin-layer chromatography plates, and in capillaries and monoliths for liquid chromatography. We also cover the new knowledge gained from the characterization of our gradients using sessile drop and Wilhelmy plate dynamic water contact angle measurements, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy mapping, and single-molecule tracking and spectroscopy. Our studies reveal important evidence of phase separation and cooperative interactions occurring along multicomponent gradients. Emerging concepts and new directions in the preparation and characterization of organosilane-based chemical gradients are also discussed.