To be or not to be translational.

Translational Research means different things to different people, but it seems crucial to almost everyone. This discipline, although defined differently in academia, regulatory institutions, and industry, shares the fundamental vision of Translational Medicine, which efficiently and effectively translates basic scientific findings relevant to human disease into knowledge that benefits patients. In the present perspective, we collected commentaries and descriptions about Translational Medicine to stimulate discussion and better understand what Translational Medicine is.

Bioactive modification of silicon surface using self-assembled hydrophobins from Pleurotus ostreatus.

A crystalline silicon surface can be made biocompatible and chemically stable by a self-assembled biofilm of proteins, the hydrophobins (HFBs) purified from the fungus Pleurotus ostreatus. The protein-modified silicon surface shows an improvement in wettability and is suitable for immobilization of other proteins. Two different proteins were successfully immobilized on the HFBs-coated chips: the bovine serum albumin and an enzyme, a laccase, which retains its catalytic activity even when bound on the chip. Variable-angle spectroscopic ellipsometry (VASE), water contact angle (WCA), and fluorescence measurements demonstrated that the proposed approach in silicon surface bioactivation is a feasible strategy for the fabrication of a new class of hybrid devices.

Langmuir-Blodgett film of hydrophobin protein from Pleurotus ostreatus at the air-water interface.

We present results concerning the formation of Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) films of a class I hydrophobin from Pleurotus ostreatus at the air-water interface, and their structure as Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) films when deposited on silicon substrates. LB films of the hydrophobin were investigated by atomic force microscopy (AFM). We observed that the compressed film at the air-water interface exhibits a molecular depletion even at low surface pressure. In order to estimate the surface molecular concentration, we fit the experimental isotherm with Volmer's equation describing the equation of state for molecular monolayers. We found that about (1)/ 10 of the molecules contribute to the surface film formation. When transferred on silicon substrates, compact and uniform monomolecular layers about 2.5 nm thick, comparable to a typical molecular size, were observed. The monolayers coexist with protein aggregates, under the typical rodlet form with a uniform thickness of about 5.0 nm. The observed rodlets appear to be a hydrophilic bilayer and can then be responsible for the surface molecular depletion.