Layer-by-layer assembly as a powerful nanofabrication technique for the design of antimicrobial surfaces in the textile industry

In this work, the fabrication of multilayer structures has been presented by using the layer-by-layer (LbL) nanoassembly technique with the aim to prevent the bacterial adhesion, pathogen colonization, or even contact-killing bacteria. The use of this nanofabrication technique is of great interest because the resultant thickness of the films can be perfectly controlled as a function of the electrostatic attraction between positive and negative charged compounds. In addition, this technique shows a great versatility because it can be implemented to a wide variety of substrates with any shape and composition (i.e., polymers, composites, medical devices, metallic substrates) without using any expensive equipment. In some cases, the polyelectrolytes can play a dual role for preparing multilayer antimicrobial surfaces. The first one is that most of them can be used for embedding active compounds, which can be released in a further step, while the second one, controlling the pH of the dipping cationic polyelectrolyte solutions can induce the presence of higher protonated charges in the outer surface, which 256can act as a better effective antimicrobial activity. Finally, a perspective in detail of these different approaches will be deeply analyzed against different bacterial strains.