Patterned Liquid-Infused Nanocoating Integrating a Sensitive Bacterial Sensing Ability to an Antibacterial Surface

The slippery liquid-infused surfaces show a great antibacterial property. However, most liquid-infused surfaces cannot detect whether or not the unknown aqueous samples contain microorganisms. Therefore, it is highly necessary but a challenge to integrate bacterial sensing capability into antibacterial surface. In this work, we prepared a slippery patterned liquid-infused nanocoating on the glass substrate for integrating bacterial sensing capability into the bacterial repellence surface. Dendritic mesoporous silica nanoparticles (DMSNs) with a suitable particle size of ca. 128 nm were employed as a building block to fabricate the multifunctional nanocoating with a superhydrophilic microwell and hydrophobic periphery by a dip-coating strategy, hydrophobic treatment, photomask-mediated plasma etching, and liquid infusion. Dendritic porous silica nanoparticles (DPSNs) with a larger particle size of ca. 260 nm were uniformly loaded with Au nanoparticles (NPs), providing large surface area for the modification of Raman reporter (4-mercaptobenzoic acid (4-MBA)) and aptamer. Thus, as a Raman tag, the formed DPSNs-Au-MBA-aptamer could achieve sensitive surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) detection of target bacteria. Combined with the Raman tag, the patterned liquid-infused nanocoating not only completely repelled bacteria on the hydrophobic area but also enabled sensitive SERS detection of Staphylococcus aureus in a very low sample volume (1 μL) with a low detection limit of 2.6 colony formation units (CFU)/mL on the antibody-modified superhydrophilic microwell. This research provided a novel and reliable strategy to construct a multifunctional nanocoating with microbial repellence and sensing capabilities.