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The ability to design stimuli-responsive biocompatible polymers is of interest
to numerous communities including drug delivery, tissue engineering, and
at a more fundamental level to polymer chemists and physicists. Recent work
in the Shantz lab has demonstrated that poly(L-lysine)-b-polyglycine diblock
and triblock copolypeptides in aqueous solution form a variety of equilibrium
structures in solution. Several different stimuli including pH, salt, and
anions can be used to modulate the size and nature of the structures formed
by these biomimetic macromolecules. These materials are unique among those
reported to date and will have relevance to numerous applications including
drug delivery, controlled released, encapsulation, and biomineralization/biomimetic
syntheses of hard matter. The current focus is on developing a more fundamental
description of the solution self-assembly behavior using methods including
static light scattering and confocal microscopy. The student(s) would be
involved in: 1) performing static light scattering measurements on lys-b-gly
and lys-b-gly-b-lys copolymers, and 2) the characterization of glu-b-gly
block copolypeptides. The lab is investigation glutamic acid (Glu) containing
block copolypeptides to compliment the lysine samples, as the coil?helix
transition for poly-L-glutamic acid is at low pH (~ 4.5) as compared to high
pH (~9.5) for poly-L-lysine.
