DNA-Polymer conjugates seem to be taking off these days. Having seen Corinne Vebert’s presentation on her DNA-poly(butadiene)-block-copolymers at this year’s polymer meeting in Freiburg, I just checked up on some chemistry blogs I read and find a post on “On the road” about a similar system by A. Herrmann, who was also present at the conference… (And of course, always remembering my own thesis about dna-polymer-conjugates).
Vebert’s system (I haven’t found a publication about this yet) consists of short ssDNA-12mers which are synthesized on a solid support and then functionalized with poly-butadiene of about 2000 g/mol, if I remember correctly. These DNA-polymer conjugates are amphiphilic, much more than the PPO-DNA-copolymers by Herrmann — and consequently assemble into spherical structures when exposed to water as solvent. I am told the conjugates are very insoluble in almost any solvent system they tried — making analytics of the conjugates a pain (who would have thought…). The cool thing about using poly-butadiene is the possibility to crosslink the innards of the micelle-like structures, making little balls coated with DNA on their surfaces.
Ahh, the beauties of using DNA in structures… of course you can attach almost anything to these spheres. And having very different polarities in the core/shell of the spheres is also fun, as Vebert demonstrated with fluorescent dyes.
Now if these things wouldn’t be so expensive and one could actually make more than a few mg of them without blowing a year’s budget… material science would be very happy indeed.
…dreaming of programmable matter…
I also started to notice the fast moving front of DNA block copolymer after that post. I guess this is based on the development of DNA chemistry these years (rather than that of DNA biology earlier). And yes the first thing emerged in my mind after seeing Herrmann’s paper was ‘progammable materials’, which encorporating DNA into polymer chemistry may provide.
BTW how to change my password?
if you are interested in these kind of DNA block copolymer materials please have a look at the following papers:
Alemdaroglu FE, Ding K, Berger R, Herrmann A: DNA-Templated Synthesis in Three Dimensions: Introducing a Micellar Scaffold for Organic Reactions: Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2006, 45: 4206-4210.
Ding K, Alemdaroglu FE, Börsch M, Berger R, Herrmann A: Engineering the Structural Properties of DNA Block Copolymer Micelles by Molecular Recognition: Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2007, 46: 1172-1175.
Alemdaroglu FE, Safak M, Berger R, Herrmann A: DNA Block Copolymers: Chem. Commun. 2007, 1358-1359.
Safak M, Alemdaroglu FE, Li Y, Ergen E, Herrmann A: Polymerase Chain Reaction as a Novel Tool for the Preparation of Block Copolymers: Adv. Mat. 2007, in press.
Alemdaroglu FE, Herrmann A: DNA Meets Synthetic Polymers – Highly Versatile Hybrid Materials: Org. Biomol. Chem. 2007, 5: 1311 - 1320. (Invited Review)