Secondary caries, denture-related candidiasis, and peri-implantitis are all failures of treatment that all dentists come across in their practice. The cause of these situations as well as the failure of many other materials in the mouth is the development of a bacterial biofilm. Biomaterials exposed to the environment of the oral cavity are immediately coated by a layer of adsorbed salivary proteins, the so-called pellicle. The pellicle provides an interface for bacterial adhesion and subsequent biofilm formation, which can lead to oral disease and failure of implants and prostheses. It should also be noted that this bacterial adhesion is specific to different pellicle compositions.

            Stephanie Wu is a third-year dental student who is conducting research concerned with the first step responsible for biofilm formation: protein adsorption. Her study is focused on elucidating the basic mechanisms that govern the formation of the initial salivary pellicle. Using model surfaces of the mouth, silica beads, with different chemical surface modifications, Stephanie quantitatively and qualitatively compared individual protein absorption of the key major salivary proteins. After incubation in human whole saliva, the bound protein amounts are compared between the different surfaces using gel electrophoresis and the identities of the different protein bands are confirmed using immunoblots and Western Blotting. Stephanie concluded that salivary protein adsorption is in fact selective and influenced by the material surface chemistries, and that this saliva-surface interaction is multifactorial. Because bacterial adhesion is affected by the pellicle composition, Stephanie hopes that her findings may one day be used to engineer biomaterial surfaces with minimized oral biofilm formation and increased biocompatibility.

            Recently, Stephanie was award the 2015 American Association for Dental Research Travel Bloc Grant to present her abstract and poster at the 2015 IADR / AADR meeting in Boston, MA. She is the current President of the Dental Student Research Group. Any questions regarding her research, or how to get involved with research at the University at Buffalo School of Dental Medicine can be directed to scwu@buffalo.edu.