Professor Cameron Alexander, School of Pharmacy, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

Synthetic Polymers and Biological Responses

Polymers which can change their conformation in response to external stimuli are now widely studied for potential applications in biology, engineering and medicine. However, there is also a growing interest in developing materials which can respond to biological stimuli, or which can exploit biological mechanisms to acquire new properties or change existing behaviour. This talk will include some recent work on polymers which respond to stimuli for applications in drug delivery,^{1, 2} sensing³ and microbiology,^{4, 5} and will also consider how prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells can respond in turn. The interplay between synthetic and biological responses is not always as it is expected to be...

            i                  ii                      iii                     iv

Figure 1: In MCF 7 cell lines (plates i and ii), thermoresponsive polymers with a transition temperature of 39 ⁰C enter cells only above this temperature (red fluorescence visible only in plate ii). However, cell entry is lower for similar polymers in HCT-116 cell lines(iii, iv).

Figure 2: Polymers grown in the presence of two E coli strains show different cell binding characteristics, reflecting a templating mechanism by which monomer sequence changes during formation of the polymers at the bacterial cell surface.

References
[1]. A. R. Khan et al Polym. Chem. 2014, 5, 5320-5329.
[2]. F. Mastrotto et al Chem. Commun. 2011, 47, 9846-9848.
[3]. J. P. Magnusson et al  Nanoscale, 2014, 6, 2368-2374.
[4]. L. T. Lui et al Nature Chem., 2013, 5, 1058–1065.
[5]. E. P. Magennis et al Nature Mater, 2014, 13, 748-755.