Smart Thin Film Membranes Adopt Properties Of Guest Molecules

Virginia Tech researchers announced last year that they had created a nanostructured membrane that incorporates DNA base pairs in order to impart molecular recognition and binding ability to the synthetic material. This year they will show for the first time that these new films, membranes, and elastomers are compatible with diverse organic and inorganic molecules and will adopt properties of the guest molecules. The research was presented as an invited talk at the 233rd national meeting of the American Chemical Society in Chicago March 25-29. Chemistry professor Tim Long's research group, students affiliated with the Macromolecule and Interfaces Institute (MII) at Virginia Tech, and the U.S. Army Research Laboratory created a block copolymer, where different monomers are linked in a sequential manner and form a nanostructured film. They used adenine and thymine nucleotides, two of the four DNA base pairs that recognize each other. Then the researchers experimented with different kinds of guest molecules with complementary hydrogen bonding sites (hydrogen has a low energy attraction to many types of atoms). ... Whole article: "www.medicalnewstoday.com":[ http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=66538]

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