Bacteria survival and growth in multi-layered silica thin films

International audience; The fields of application of sol–gel encapsulation technology for living cells have been greatly extended over the last few years. Photobioreactors,1 biofuel cells,2 bio-remediation materials,3 biosensors4 and biomedical devices5 are currently being developed taking advantage of the robustness of inorganic materials compared to their (bio)-organic counterparts. In many of these applications, the formation of stable thin films (<1 μm) would be highly desirable for integration, for instance, in bio-chips.6 However, several limitations exist when trying to transfer a protocol mainly developed from bulk hydrogels to thin films. Especially, the storage stability becomes m…