Engineering Commons^™

Encapsulation And Stabilization Of Biomacromolecules, Whitney Blocher Blocher Mctigue

Doctoral Dissertations

Recent work in the area of protein encapsulation has turned away from traditional methods of sequestration toward gentler, purely aqueous techniques. Among them, complex coacervation has become a topic of discussion. Complex coacervation is an all-aqueous liquid-liquid phase separation phenomenon dominated by electrostatic interactions and entropic gains. The use of coacervates as protein encapsulants has garnered much attention, but there has been little headway in determining a set of design rules. We considered coacervation between two oppositely-charged polypeptides and a biomacromolecule cargo to investigate the effects of changing aspects of the coacervating polymers and/or various solution parameters. We characterized the …