Effects of Wettability and Surface Roughness of Hollow Fiber Membranes on Bacterial Adhesion

North Atrium

Hollow fiber membranes (HFMs) have a wide variety of applications, such as for hemodialysis filtration membranes and as bioreactors, and, depending on the use, cellular adhesion to the HFMs may be discourage, the former, or encouraged, the latter. Fortunately, HFMs can be created from many different spinmass mixtures of polymers and additives with each mixture yielding a particular set of HFM characterizations. This research will be focusing on the properties of wettability and surface roughness of a variety of commercially available HFMs and how they impact the adhesion of two biofilms forming bacterial species, Pseudomonas chlororapis isolate O6 (PcO6) and Bacillus subtilis isolate 309 (Bs309). PcO6 produces a biofilm that is orange, thick, and slimy and, in stark contrast, Bs309 produces a biofilm that is white, dry, and wrinkly and this difference will provide insight to bacterial preference in HFMs. In order to encourage the growth of the bacterial biofilms on the external surface of the HFM, a lysogeny broth (LB), a nutritionally rich medium, will be flowed continuously through the lumen of the HFM that will then wick the outer surface. Wettability of the HFMs will be assessed using a tensiometer that will measure the amount of saturation and subsequent evaporation the HFMs are capable of and the surface roughness of the HFMs will be observed through SEM imaging. The bacterial biofilms will be imaged using a fluorescence microscope on a day to day basis in order to observe any visual changes that occur in the growth between the different HFMs.