Interactions in bioadhesion: from studying biofilms to creating protein vesicles

The growth of biofilms is an ubiquitous phenomenon, yet mostly unwanted, costly, and even dangerous in a biomedical as well as in a technical context. Adhesion as the first step in the biofilm development is the precondition for the film development and influences its final structure. For a better understanding of this step, we develop bacterial and protein model systems to study the governing interactions and the involved processes. One of these model systems is the adsorption of hydrophobins to fluid interfaces. Hydrophobins are small proteins with a Janus particle character allowing them to cover any hydrophilic/hydrophobic interface. Creating interfacial hydrophobin films and contacting them in a microfluidic setup enables the direct measurement of the protein-protein interactions. Moreover, stable protein bilayers between two aqueous or two oily phases could be created with this method. With the employment of the microfluidic jetting technique, even stable vesicles could be produced from these layers. These vesicles are the first example of liposomes with a membrane composed solely of natural proteins.