Berlin 2015 – scientific programme
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 5: Nanoparticles and Composite Materials I (joint CPP/BP)
BP 5.8: Talk
Monday, March 16, 2015, 11:45–12:00, C 243
Insulin capped gold nanoparticles-polymer brush composites — •Muriel Rovira Esteva1, Marcel Richter1, Olaf Soltwedel2, Zuleyha Yenice1, Marcus Witt1, Stefan Wellert1, and Regine von Klitzing1 — 1Stranski Laboratorium für Physikalische und Theoretische Chemie, Technische Universität Berlin, 10623 Berlin, Germany — 2Max-Planck-Institut für Festkörperforschung, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany
Polymer brushes are polymers grafted to a surface by one end, with a density high enough to induce the polymer chains to stretch away from the surface. This stretching is often responsive to environmental conditions, which makes them a suitable candidate for the design of smart coatings, among a number of other applications. Polymer brush-nanoparticle composites allow to combine the responsive properties of the brush with the physico-chemical properties of the particles. Therefore, determination of how the geometric parameters affect the behavior of the composite is of high scientific and technological significance.
Gold nanoparticles capped with sodium citrate are often used in these composites, but they pose a series of instability problems. In this work, monodisperse gold nanoparticles with sodium citrate capping were synthesized, and their capping was replaced by insulin, adapting a method by M. Chanana et al. The higher stability against strong pH variations of the insulin capped particles was confirmed with UV-Vis. Incorporation of particles with different cappings into brushes with different geometries allowed to obtain a variety of polymer brush-gold nanoparticle composites, and the effect of the geometrical parameters on the brush-nanoparticle interactions was then explored using a number of techniques, such as AFM and reflectometry.