An Oxygen-Tolerant PET-RAFT Polymerization for Screening Structure-Activity Relationships

Area of Science:

• Polymer Chemistry
• Biomaterials Science
• Surface Chemistry

Background:

• Designing optimal polymer architectures for biointerfaces is complex.
• High-throughput synthesis and screening offer a viable alternative for polymer discovery.

Purpose of the Study:

• To adapt a porphyrin-catalyzed photoinduced electron/energy transfer-reversible addition-fragmentation chain-transfer (PET-RAFT) polymerization for high-throughput synthesis.
• To investigate the impact of polymer architecture on protein binding using this method.

Main Methods:

• Adapted PET-RAFT polymerization for high-throughput synthesis in DMSO under air.
• Synthesized functional 3- and 4-arm star polymers with excellent control.
• Investigated protein binding to concanavalin A (ConA) using synthesized polymers.

Main Results:

• Demonstrated oxygen-tolerant PET-RAFT polymerization for complex polymer architectures.
• Achieved excellent control over the synthesis of functional 3- and 4-arm star polymers.
• Established a method to screen polymer structure-activity relationships for protein interactions.

Conclusions:

• The developed PET-RAFT method enables efficient, high-throughput synthesis of diverse polymer architectures.
• This approach facilitates the investigation of polymer-protein interactions and structure-activity relationships.
• The method is broadly applicable for screening polymer effects in various biointerface applications.