Norbornene Derived Functional Homopolymers for Selective Heavy Metal Sensing

Bhattacharya, Sourav (2015) Norbornene Derived Functional Homopolymers for Selective Heavy Metal Sensing. PhD thesis, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata.

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Abstract

Nothing is more basic to life on our planet than water which is the most precious and essential ingredient to sustain our life on earth. It’s a growing concern across the globe to ensure pure and sufficient water to meet the needs of households, agriculture and industry. Environmental problems related to water have been widely recognized as the most immediate and serious threats to humankind. Hence the following thesis is presented here which will address the existing shortcomings. Our research is therefore mainly focused on developing polymer based sensor systems of toxic heavy metal like As (III), Hg (II), Fe (III). Most of the existing sensing systems are small molecules based. It is expected that polymer based sensor materials will provide a better response than small molecules or monomers, as small molecules are hydrophobic in nature whereas polymers we can make hydrophilic by making copolymer by attaching poly ethelene glycol (PEG) moiety. Moreover most useful advantage of polymer is that the making of polymer coated paper-strips (that is very useful in the field of sensing because we monitor the trace of analyte without the need of special equipment) which is very uniform in case polymer where as in case of monomer it leeches out from the strips. Towards our goal, we have designed our monomers that contain target binding group with a fluorophore as responsive moiety. Depending upon the target analyte, the binding group is varied and the fluorophore is chosen accordingly. As target analyte we mostly aimed for materials which are very harmful to society and hence there is demand for detecting them within their WHO’s (World Health Organization) permissible limit. In our case norbornene have chosen as backbone because it is very easy to functionalize. As a polymerization technique we followed ring opening metathesis polymerization (ROMP) of norbornene monomers using Grubbs’ catalyst is the best one. Also the efficiency, control, and tolerability of the ruthenium catalysts to a variety of pendant functional groups make this polymerization method a unique way for us. The most important property of the polymerization is livingness. Due to amphiphilic nature of the homopolymer it will be expected to form self-assembly depending on the choice of the solvent. The aggregation property of the homopolymer is studied by DLS, SEM, TEM analysis. Also we did drug-encapsulation & release study in vivo as well as in vitro enviorenment. The cell-viability and flow-cytometry data suggests the biocompatibility as well as surface selectivity of our system.

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