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Updated: Mar 21, 2026

Microwave-assisted Functionalization of Polyethylene glycol and On-resin Peptides for Use in Chain Polymerizations and Hydrogel Formation
Published on: October 29, 2013
Functionalized poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate microgels by microfluidics: In situ peptide encapsulation for in
Giorgia Celetti1, Concetta Di Natale2, Filippo Causa3
1Center for Advanced Biomaterials for Healthcare@CRIB, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), Largo Barsanti e Matteucci 53, 80125 Naples, Italy; Department of Applied Science and Technology, Polytechnic of Turin, Corso Duca degli Abbruzzi, 24, 10129 Turin, Italy.
Abstract:
Polymeric microparticles represent a robustly platform for the detection of clinically relevant analytes in biological samples; they can be functionalized encapsulating a multiple types of biologics entities, enhancing their applications as a new class of colloid materials. Microfluidic offers a versatile platform for the synthesis of monodisperse and engineered microparticles. In this work, we report microfluidic synthesis of novel polymeric microparticles endowed with specific peptide due to its superior specificity for target binding in complex media. A peptide sequence was efficiently encapsulated into the polymeric network and protein binding occurred with high affinity (KD 0.1-0.4μM). Fluidic dynamics simulation was performed to optimize the production conditions for monodisperse and stable functionalized microgels. The results demonstrate the easy and fast realization, in a single step, of functionalized monodisperse microgels using droplet-microfluidic technique, and how the inclusion of the peptide within polymeric network improve both the affinity and the specificity of protein capture.

