Probing Heterogenous Water Created by Surfactants and Cyclodextrins through Interactions with some Selected Small Molecules

Maity, Arnab (2014) Probing Heterogenous Water Created by Surfactants and Cyclodextrins through Interactions with some Selected Small Molecules. PhD thesis, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Kolkata.

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Abstract

The focus of the works was to understand the different parameters of the microheterogeneous bio-compatible environments created by various systems constituted by surfactants. We have used some strategically designed compounds so as to acquire as much knowledge as possible for the different forms of aggregations obtained by the surfactants of different categories, cationic, anionic and neutral. We observed that variation in surfactant aggregation and hence the compactness induced appreciable change in the binding characteristics of the probe to the micelles formed by anionic surfactants of different chain lengths. Thinking further in this area to imply the effect of compactness of the micelles formed by anionic as well as cationic surfactants on energy transfer in a donor-acceptor pair, we studied Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) in a suitable system. Gaining knowledge about FRET between a donor and an acceptor in the micellar environments we wanted to study a biologically relevant FRET pair in the biocompatible hydrophobic milieu of cyclodextrins (CDs). We concluded that energy transfer from tryptophan to pyrene can be controlled using hydrophobic hosts like CDs of different size. Studying further in this context we examined interaction of a biologically potent coordination complex having antitumour activity with the bio-mimicking environment created by ionic surfactants. From the experimental outcomes it is understandable that motif of interaction of the cationic and anionic surfactants is different and depends on the direction of interaction of the micellar scaffolds with the ligand and the complex. The results that we obtained from the study improvised us to design two more inorganic ligands and to observe their behaviour with micelles and reverse micelles. The experiments described in the present work had been modelled to unveil the physicochemical aspects of different molecular systems in various microheterogeneous environments principally developed by surfactants. We coupled these studies with the partially hydrophobic environments of cyclodextrins (CDs) and involved nanoparticle interfaces to enhance the facets of findings to open avenues for future prospects.

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