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100th Anniversary of Macromolecular Science Viewpoint: The Role of Hydrophobicity in Polymer Phenomena.

ABSTRACT: The seemingly simple notion of the hydrophobic effect can be viewed from multiple angles involving theory, simulation, and experiments. This viewpoint examines five attributes of predictive models to enhance synthetic efforts as well as experimental methods to quantify hydrophobicity. In addition, we compare existing predictive models against experimental data for polymer surface tension, lower critical solution temperature, solution self-assembly morphology, and degradation behavior. Key conclusions suggest that both the Hildebrand solubility parameters (HSPs) and surface area-normalized Log P (Log P SA^-1) values provide unique and complementary insights into polymer phenomena. In particular, HSPs appear to better describe bulk polymer phenomena for thermoplastics such as surface tension, while Log P SA^-1 values are well-suited for describing and predicting the behavior of polymers in solution.

SUBMITTER: Foster JC

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7717397 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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100th Anniversary of Macromolecular Science Viewpoint: The Role of Hydrophobicity in Polymer Phenomena.

Foster Jeffrey C JC Akar Irem I Grocott Marcus C MC Pearce Amanda K AK Mathers Robert T RT O'Reilly Rachel K RK

ACS macro letters 20201104 11

The seemingly simple notion of the hydrophobic effect can be viewed from multiple angles involving theory, simulation, and experiments. This viewpoint examines five attributes of predictive models to enhance synthetic efforts as well as experimental methods to quantify hydrophobicity. In addition, we compare existing predictive models against experimental data for polymer surface tension, lower critical solution temperature, solution self-assembly morphology, and degradation behavior. Key conclu ...[more]

PMID: 33299653

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Project description:The formation of condensed matter typically involves a trade-off between structural order and flexibility. As the extent and directionality of interactions between atomic or molecular components increase, materials generally become more ordered but less compliant, and vice versa. Nevertheless, high levels of structural order and flexibility are not necessarily mutually exclusive; there are many biological (such as microtubules1,2, flagella 3 , viruses4,5) and synthetic assemblies (for example, dynamic molecular crystals6-9 and frameworks10-13) that can undergo considerable structural transformations without losing their crystalline order and that have remarkable mechanical properties8,14,15 that are useful in diverse applications, such as selective sorption 16 , separation 17 , sensing 18 and mechanoactuation 19 . However, the extent of structural changes and the elasticity of such flexible crystals are constrained by the necessity to maintain a continuous network of bonding interactions between the constituents of the lattice. Consequently, even the most dynamic porous materials tend to be brittle and isolated as microcrystalline powders 14 , whereas flexible organic or inorganic molecular crystals cannot expand without fracturing. Owing to their rigidity, crystalline materials rarely display self-healing behaviour 20 . Here we report that macromolecular ferritin crystals with integrated hydrogel polymers can isotropically expand to 180 per cent of their original dimensions and more than 500 per cent of their original volume while retaining periodic order and faceted Wulff morphologies. Even after the separation of neighbouring ferritin molecules by 50 ångströms upon lattice expansion, specific molecular contacts between them can be reformed upon lattice contraction, resulting in the recovery of atomic-level periodicity and the highest-resolution ferritin structure reported so far. Dynamic bonding interactions between the hydrogel network and the ferritin molecules endow the crystals with the ability to resist fragmentation and self-heal efficiently, whereas the chemical tailorability of the ferritin molecules enables the creation of chemically and mechanically differentiated domains within single crystals.

Dataset Information

100th Anniversary of Macromolecular Science Viewpoint: The Role of Hydrophobicity in Polymer Phenomena.

Publications

100th Anniversary of Macromolecular Science Viewpoint: The Role of Hydrophobicity in Polymer Phenomena.

Similar Datasets

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