Electrochemical and optical investigation of dental pulp stem cell adhesion on modified porous silicon scaffolds.

Extensive use of porous silicon (PSi) for tissue engineering is due to its convenient properties as it is both nontoxic and bioresorbable. Moreover, PSi surface modification is an important step to enhance cell adhesion and proliferation. In this work, a combination of optical and electrochemical studies is performed to elaborate a suitable PSi multilayer substrate for cell culture. For this study, we modified PSi surface by silanization and antibody grafting (APTES-anti STRO1), the 12-mer specific peptide to silicon p + type coating and the peptide modified with the antibody recognition sequence. Electrochemical characterization of PSi multilayers is performed to investigate its electrical behavior, determine the optimal measuring conditions and reveal the most stable PSi surfaces. Then, the behavior of dental pulp stem cells (DPSC) was investigated on various modified PSi surfaces. An electrochemical method was applied for the first time monitoring the electrical behavior of stem cell adhesion. The cells electrochemical behavior depends on the nature of the surface coating and the peptide-anti STRO1 improved adhesion and cell spreading onto the PSi surface compared to bare surface and the one coated with the peptide. Fluorescent microscopy revealed that all surface modification methods enhance cell adhesion compared to the bare PSi surface. An increased cell number is observed on APTES-anti STRO1, peptide and peptide-anti STRO1 coated PSi. The peptide-anti STRO1 provided the best cell proliferation results suggesting the improved accessibility of the recognition fragment of the antibody anti-STRO1.

Towards InAs/InGaAs/GaAs Quantum Dot Solar Cells Directly Grown on Si Substrate.

This paper reports on an initial assessment of the direct growth of In(Ga)As/GaAs quantum dots (QDs) solar cells on nanostructured surface Si substrate by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE). The effect of inserting 40 InAs/InGaAs/GaAs QDs layers in the intrinsic region of the heterojunction pin-GaAs/n⁺-Si was evaluated using photocurrent spectroscopy in comparison with pin-GaAs/n⁺-Si and pin-GaAs/GaAs without QDs. The results reveal the clear contribution of the QDs layers to the improvement of the spectral response up to 1200 nm. The novel structure has been studied by X ray diffraction (XRD), photoluminescence spectroscopy (PL) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). These results provide considerable insights into low cost III-V material-based solar cells.