Porous functional nanofilms for designing bioinspired sensor surfaces

• Bio-mimicking of recognition features typical of biological molecules such as aminoacids, peptides, nucleic acid etc. is leading to the design and development of novel functional (artificial) materials for chemical/biochemical sensing applications. The insertion of biological molecules or their active sites into the backbone of synthetic polymers is one of the possible ways to achieve this. Herein, we synthesised a polymerisable derivative of an amino acid (L-histidine) through a set of reactions with 1-(1Hbenzo[d][1,2,3]triazol-1-yl)-2-methylprop-2-en-1-one (MA-Bt), since amino acid residues are the origin for the functional properties and highly selective substrate-binding ability of many extended biological structures. We obtained a functional monomer methacryloylamidohistidine (MAH), which was polymerised with 2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate in presence of polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) on a gold surface. The aim of using PVA was to obtain highly porous polymeric structure. For control purpose, polymers without MAH and PVA were also synthesised. The morphology of the polymeric film on gold surface was characterized with scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM). The obtained polymer showed significant affinity for Cu2+. The electrochemical behaviour of the polymeric films was systematically investigated with differential pulse voltammetry (DPV). The presence of pores was shown to significantly improve the recognition performance of the film.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Kemi -- Polymerkemi (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Chemical Sciences -- Polymer Chemistry (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Bio - mimicking ; amino aci ds; porous polymeric film

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

kon (subject category)