A Multiple-Functional Ag/SiO₂/Organic Based Biomimetic Nanocomposite Membrane for High-Stability Protein Recognition and Cell Adhesion/Detachment

Biomimetic multilevel structured membrane materials have great potential for energy-efficient chemical separations and biomedical applications. The current study represents a simple, yet efficient, method to obtain the biomimetic protein separation membrane and controllable cell culture substrate with high stability, selectivity, and antibacterial property. Here, a molecular imprinting methodology is reported to introduce the high-biocompatible protein ovalbumin (Ova) to a multilevel Ag/SiO₂/organic based molecularly imprinted membranes (ASO-MIMs), which have made significant achievements in protein identification and controllable growth of liver cells in vitro platform. Interestingly, the relative morphological observations of the adhered cells and in vitro viability tests show no significant difference between the ASO-MIMs binding with 13.6 mg g^-1 Ova (13.6-ASO-MIMs) and bare glass, indicating the excellent biocompatibility of the 13.6-ASO-MIMs. Here, the results on largely enhanced adsorption capacity, perm-selectivity (β values are more than 2.2), regeneration ability (still maintained 90% of the maximum adsorption capacity after 10 cycling operation), and high-performance cell adhesion system (controlled by the binding amount of template protein) are shown, which clearly demonstrates the potential value of this method in smart biomaterials and biosensors.