NANOSTRUCTURED POLYMERS FOR OPTOELECTRONICS AND BIOTECHNOLOGICAL APPLICATIONS

1. NANOSTRUCTURED POLYMERS FOR OPTOELECTRONICS AND BIOTECHNOLOGICAL APPLICATIONS Iole Venditti1, Rosa Vitaliano1, Floriana Vitale1,2, Cleofe Palocci1, Ilaria Fratoddi1, Chiara Battocchio3, Laura Chronopoulou1, Leander Tapfer2, Maria Vittoria Russo1* 1 Dept.Chemistry, University of Rome “La Sapienza”, p.le Aldo Moro 5 00185 Roma Italy. * corresponding author: mariavittoria.russo@uniroma1.it2 ENEA, Centro Ricerhe Brindisi, Strada.Statale “Appia” km.713, 72100 Brindisi (Italy) 3 Dept. of Physics, University “Roma Tre”, Via della Vasca Navale, 84 - 00146 Rome, Italy

2. Top down bottom up The synthesis, characterization and technological applications of nanostructured polymers received a great deal of attention quite recently. Among the variety of polymers in nanostructured feature, p-conjugated polymers and polyacrylates are good candidates for biotech and sensors applications. Moreover, there is a great interest concerning the immobilization of biologic entities such as proteins on nanostructured materials. A variety of nanostructured polymers with different chemical structure have been obtained by catalytic polymerization or by an osmotic procedure, i.e. employing the bottom up or top down convergent approaches. The research activity of our group is involved in the synthesis and characterization of p-conjugated or aliphatic polymeric materials.

3. PPA PDMPA PDMPAHCl PDMPAHBr PMMA M-DEBP • The polymers object of our investigations are hereafter reported: • Conjugated polymers: polyphenylacetylene (PPA), polydimethylpropargylamine (PDMPA) and copolymers • Polyacrylates (PMMA) and copolymers. • Organometallic polymers, oligomers and model molecules containing Pt(II) or Pd(II) and diethynylbiphenyl as organic spacer (M-DEBP) • The polymeric materials were fully characterized by means of IR, UV, PL, NMR, GPC, LS, SEM, TEM, XPS, EXAFS and NEXAFS techniques.

4. a c d f b e The polymeric materials have been deposited in nanostructured shapes, obtaining different morphologies. Nanospheres, nanofibers, nanosponges have been isolated with two synthetic approaches: synthetic method or osmotic procedure a)PPA nanobeads obtained by osmotic procedure, diameter 250 nm; b) PDMPA film obtained by catalytic synthesis; c) PDMPAHCl nanofibres obtained by osmotic procedure; d) PDMPAHBr grains obtained by catalytic synthesis; e) M-DEBP nanofibers obtained by synthesis, diameter 50-100 nm; f) PMMA nanospheres, diameter 250 nm, obtained by emulsion synthesis

5. Our recent research is also committed to the achievement of functionalized organometallic molecular models which are able to be covalently bound to gold nanoclusters in order to explore advanced perspectives for new nanostructured materials. Biotechnological applications of nanostructured polymers have been exploited by the development of hybrid systems obtained immobilizing enzymes or biological molecules onto polymeric nanospheres. The activity studies of hybrid systems showed an improved performance in terms of activity and selectivity with respect to enzymes adsorbed on non-nanostructured carriers.