Hi Zara,

please check the attached literature, we use glass functionalization to immobilize collagen or fibronectin for instance.

Cheers,

Marcus

Article Aligned fibrillar collagen matrices obtained by shear flow deposition

Article Tightly anchored tissue-mimetic matrices as instructive stem...

First thing of all is to know what kind of surface you are targeting to put the collagen scaffold on.

Hi Zara, the first things that you need to describe are the surface chemistries of the substances you are trying to combine. We can examine the chemistries from there.

(Go Swans and my relative Gylfi)

Thank you for the replies. I have a 3D collagen scaffold that I am trying to attach to a petri dish (tissue culture plastic). 

Hi Zara,

if you like to chemically attach the scaffold, you must activate the plastic surface with plasma treatment for instance - this creates reactive groups for chemical activation/binding, otherwise the polystyrene is inert to most chemical activation attempts.

There are many protocols around for activation of TCP.

Good luck,

Marcus

Another option is to use a substrate that gets charged in solution. This could be accomplished with substrate and collagen having different isoelectric point values and choosing a pH value in between. Mica for example, is quite popular for this reason in the AFM investigation of biomolecules and polymers such as DNA. You also would like to keep in mind the roughness of the substrate which should be much smaller than the collagen fibers you aim at investigating. You can also consider using graphite (HOPG) which although it is chemically inert, the pi-pi interaction with organic molecules is often enough to ensure the mechanical stability needed for AFM imaging in liquids. Both of these substrates, HOPG and mica, can be atomically by simple mechanical cleavage with adhesive tape.