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. 2018 Jan 18;8:1071. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-19484-x

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© The Author(s) 2018

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Bactericidal activities of the spear-type and pocket-type surfaces after 2 hours’ incubation. (a) SEM images showing morphology of S. epidermidis on the spear-type surface. Some bacteria were flattened indicating cell death (red arrows). (b,c) The interaction between S. epidermidis cell membrane and the nanostructured spear-type surface, visualized by FIB-SEM. The sharp tips of nano-spears on surfaces resulted in the deformation of bacteria cell membranes (white arrows). The red arrows represent cell rupture and leakage of cytoplasm, which extended down into the nanostructure. (d) Representative SEM images showing S. epidermidis cell membrane directly penetrated by the longer nano-spears inside the pockets (red arrow). (e,f): The interaction between S. epidermidis cell membrane and the nano-spears of pocket-type, as visualized by FIB-SEM. The bactericidal activities of these nanostructures were a result of the combined effect of the penetration (red arrows) and the stretching/compression from the nano-spears (white arrows).