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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

Someday, cicadas and dragonflies might save your sight [phys.org]. The key to this power lies in their wings, which are coated with a forest of tiny pointed pillars that impale and kill bacterial cells unlucky enough to land on them. Now, scientists report they have replicated these antibacterial nanopillars on synthetic polymers that are being developed to restore vision.
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"Our method is based on one developed in the early 2000s for the semiconductor industry," says Mary Nora Dickson, a graduate student in Yee's lab. "It is robust, inexpensive and can be used in industrial production. So it can now be applied to medical devices that could improve people's quality of life."

One such application is an artificial cornea that Yee's group aims to construct from poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA), familiar to many by trade names such as Plexiglas and Lucite. The material is already commonly used in medical devices including implantable intraocular lenses and traditional hard contact lenses. By building nanopillars into the surfaces of these types of devices, the researchers hope to make them bactericidal without the need for a separate biocidal coating or antibiotic drugs.

In earlier work, Yee, Dickson, Elena Liang, and colleagues at the University of California, Irvine, showed that their nanopillars, like those on cicada wings, can kill bacteria referred to as "gram-negative." This group of microorganisms includes E. coli. But cicada nanopillars are unable to kill another type of bacteria known as "gram-positive" because these microbes have thicker cell walls. Wiping out these bacteria, which include MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) and Streptococcus (known as "strep"), is important because they cause infections on medical devices and in hospitals.

Original Submission