Dear Colleagues,

Biotechnology has revolutionized many industries. It will dramatically impact the coating industry, by creating biocoatings with functionalities far beyond today's polymer coatings. A Special Issue of Coatings, combining biotechnology and coatings, has never before been published. This Special Issue will highlight advances in colloid and polymer materials, enzyme and microbial biotechnology that will dramatically transform the functionality of waterborne coatings using the selectivity and reactivity of biology. Biocoatings have been demonstrated in laboratory studies that preserve and stabilize the reactivity of enzymes, biomolecules (pigments, nucleic acids, proteins) or reactive microbes (bacteria, yeast, fungi, archea, algae) for hundreds to thousands of hours. Biocoatings can react to chemicals in the environment and degrade toxins; others are photoreactive producing or consuming gasses using solar energy. Some can be used as biocatalysts for chiral chemical transformations in aqueous or multi-phase systems, while others sense their environment (color change, luminesce, fluoresce) or self-tune to incident light intensity. There is a very significant gap between these academic demonstrations and the information needed for development of commercial biocoatings. Methods are needed for waterborne biocoating formulation, drying/curing without inactivation, wet adhesion, and optimization of nanoporosity. Modeling of the porosity, stability and reactivity of single or multi-component biocoatings is lacking. Close collaboration is needed between academic and industrial developers in the next 5 to 10 years to establish standards for measuring coating safety and stability for biocoatings to become commercial products proven in the market. This issue will highlight both the advances and the many challenges for commercial development of coatings utilizing biotechnology. Please contact me if you wish to discuss your contribution to this Special Issue on "Advancing Coatings with Biotechnology 2018".

Prof. Dr. Michael C. Flickinger
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Coatings is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• reactive enzyme coatings

• biocatalytic coatings

• photoreactive biocoatings

• biocatalytic plastics

• waterborne biocoatings

• smart coatings using biotechnology

• bioreactive polymer coatings