In this work, pulsed inductively coupled plasma (PICP) device is introduced to treat crosslinked gelatin film. The effects of plasma on the properties of gelatin film were investigated. Type A gelatin film crosslinked by dehydrothermal process was treated by PICP. The properties of crosslinked gelatin were characterized by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), amino acid content assay (TNBS), contact angle measurement and atomic force microscopy (AFM). The results showed that pulsed inductively coupled plasma did not significantly affect the thermal behavior and the degree of crosslinking of crosslinked gelatin film. The contact angle by both water and ethylene glycol of crosslinked gelatin films treated with nitrogen plasma was decreased in comparison with untreated film. The surface energy was slightly increased when increasing number of repeated discharges were applied from 1 to 20 times. This implied that nitrogen plasma could improve hydrophilicity of the crosslinked gelatin surface. The result from AFM revealed that surface roughness of crosslinked gelatin film was introduced when PICP treatment was applied. In vitro test using L929 mouse fibroblast revealed that, the number of cells proliferated on PICP-treated samples was higher than that on untreated samples. The results indicated that PICP is a potential method for crosslinked gelatin surface modification for future tissue engineering applications.
Copyright 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.