Catching up with OMNISEC! Part 4
We’re back with the fourth round of Catching up with OMNISEC! Following up on our first three posts, we have another nice collection of publications showcasing the powerful multi-detector GPC/SEC system OMNISEC.
This year, the applications cover a wide range, from novel methods to fine-tune a polymer, a way to study renewable materials, a self-healing hydrogel with the potential for drug delivery, polymers with unique architectures, and COVID-19 research. Read on to learn more!
Electroediting of Soft Polymer Backbones
Our friends at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in the group of Professor John Brantley have developed an electrochemical approach that offers degradation and functionalization of polynorbornene. When the researchers electrolyzed the polynorbornene they were able to observe degradation and, separately, append an azide that could then be further reacted with ethynyl pyrene to add a strongly UV-absorbing group via click chemistry. In addition to general characterization of the polymers involved, data from OMNISEC confirmed the sample degradation and shift to lower molecular weights. Cool stuff!
Hear Professor Brantley talk about it himself at our 2022 Virtual OMNISEC User Meeting! Professor Brantley’s talk begins at 1:27:15.
Structure–Properties Relationship of Reprocessed Bionanocomposites
Dr. Oscar Gil-Castell et al. from the Instituto de Tecnología de Materiales in Spain, along with collaborators at Unidad de Desarrollo Tecnológico in Chile and Dipartimento di Ingegneria Civile, Chimica, Ambientale e dei Materiali in Italy studied the physical properties of PLA with nanofibrillated cellulose (NFC) and plasticized with PEG. Originating from renewable sources, the goal was to determine how reprocessing affects the materials and if they are sustainable candidates for food packaging or agricultural applications. OMNISEC was able to provide the molecular weight analysis after different processing stages, highlighted by the mass distributions of PLA, PLA-PEG, and PLA-PEG-NFC bionanocomposites after compounding, dog-bone, and film-specimen preparation.
Click here to learn more about how OMNISEC can help you characterize your PLA and related materials!
Self-Healing Thiazolidine-Crosslinked Hydrogels
Amandine Guérinot, Renaud Nicolaÿ et al. at Molecular, Macromolecular Chemistry and Materials (C3M), ESPCI Paris have synthesized and characterized the a self-healing hydrogel based on the reversible condensation of benzaldehyde with a 1,2-aminothiol group. Even more impressive is that the self-healing nature of the hydrogel renders the material injectable. That, along with its tolerance for acidic conditions, offers the potential for using the hydrogels as drug carriers. The functionalized polyacrylamides, one with pendant aldehydes and the other with 1,2-aminothio moieties, were characterized using OMNISEC to determine their molecular weights prior to hydrogel formation. Great stuff!
Synthesis of bottlebrush polymers
The group of Professor Michael D. Schulz at Virginia Tech University recently reported the synthesis of bottlebrush polymers utilizing poly(N-sulfonyl aziridine) macromonomers. Data from an OMNISEC REVEAL ULTRA coupled to a Waters ACQUITY APC system provided sufficient sensitivity to characterize the molecular weight of the macromonomer (the lower molecular weight polymer with a polymerizable end group, i.e. the brushes of the bottlebrush topography). Even cooler is that they used DLS data from a Zetasizer to monitor the formation of the bottlebrush polymer and were able to observe deaggregation over the course of the polymerization!
COVID-19 research
San Hadži and a team of researchers from Chemistry and Chemical Technology, University of Ljubljana and Department of Synthetic Biology and Immunology, National Institute of Chemistry, Ljubljana in Slovenia have published an article detailing their studies of the stalk of the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2. The oligomerization state was studied, and OMNISEC was used to provide this data, which resulted in the observation of a large monomer peak and a smaller trimer peak (labelled M and T, respectively, in the left figure below). Also, the light scattering chromatograms to the right in the figure below highlight OMNISEC’s ability to observe aggregates (the peak eluting before 10 mL)!
Final Thoughts
In conclusion, this marks the fourth year in a row of Catching up with OMNISEC. If you are an OMNISEC user and wish to have your publication included in a future Catching up with OMNISEC post, please contact me at kyle.williams@malvernpanalytical.com.
Further reading