Adhesive Interaction between Supramolecularly Organized Systems Doped with Blue Carbon Dots and Hydrophobic or Hydrophilic Surfaces

Abstract

Ordered self-organized lyotropic liquid crystals (LLCs) are widely used in biomedicine due to their ability to encapsulate chemically diverse biomaterials, i.e., hydrophobic or hydrophilic substrates. The creation of LLC complexes with carbon or quantum dots can yield systems with combined functions. Carbon dots (CDs), which are semiconductor nanomaterials, have unique luminescent properties and can be embedded into lyotropic mesophases (lyomesophases) to create hybrid systems and provide their use in biosensing, medical imaging, and theranostics. Importantly, wettability, adhesive interaction, friction, and permeability are in the main focus among the basic physicochemical surface characteristics of a polymer-based material. The wetting ability of a hybrid system is known to be determined by surface tension, which is very important for its interaction with the environment, e.g., with the surfaces of capillaries, tissues of blood vessel walls, skin, polymer tubes, and surface coatings of medical equipment elements. This paper describes the results of wetting of model hydrophobic and hydrophilic surfaces (glass, nylon, polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), and polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE)) with CD-doped gels and lyomesophases. Low-viscosity gels wetted these surfaces better than more viscous liquid crystal phases did, and the adhesion of a hybrid CD-doped sample had the same order of magnitude in contact either with glass or with a membrane for similar oligoethylene oxide-based lyomesophases. The adhesive characteristics of LLCs and gel-like systems prepared in the study may appear useful in the development of drug delivery methods for diagnostic and therapeutic nanosystems with improved functionality.