Control of Cell Adhesiveness on Plasma Polymerized Thin Film Deposited with Tetrakis(trimethylsilyloxy)Silane and Cyclohexane Precursors

Cell adhesion is a critical step for culturing various cells. The adhesion depends on various physical and biological properties of the underlying glass slides. Due to the complex interaction between glass slides and cells, culturing of cells is difficult to fully understand. The biocompatibility of plasma polymerized thin film tends to depend on the chemical functional groups on the surface. In this paper, we formed a plasma polymerized thin film, whose surface properties for cell culturing we could adjust simply by optimizing the deposition conditions, specifically the precursor injection ratios. We then found that the various gas ratios used to deposit tetrakis(trimethylsilyloxy) silane and cyclohexane precursors on the constructed films appeared to alter cell adhesiveness. Cell adhesiveness to various plasma polymerized thin films showed a similar propensity in two different cell lines of mouse embryonic fibroblast cells and bovine aortic endothelial cells. In addition, we characterized the plasma polymerized thin films using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. We used the mixed precursor process to develop a method to control cellular adhesion on glass slides without the additive process, and made stable and suitable thin films on glass slides.