Surface-induced assembly of sophorolipids

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

, T of 25 °C and relative humidity of 25%. The local structure of the sophorolipid films was characterized by atomic force microscopy, while scanning electron microscopy was used to characterize the spatial homogeneity. We also attempted to correlate dispersive, electron donor and electron attractor surface energy components, using Good-van Oss's approach, and the behavior of sophorolipids. We found that when the surface energy is dominated by dispersive components, sophorolipids spontaneously assemble into entangled needles at all pH values (4, 6 and 11). However, when the surface energy is dominated by electronic components, pH has a strong influence on the surface self-assembly. We could discriminate three major organizations: homogeneous layer, isolated aggregates and a two-dimensional fibrillar network.