Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Engineering
Engineering Multifunctional And Morphologically Diverse Polymer Brush Surfaces, Cassandra M. Reese
Engineering Multifunctional And Morphologically Diverse Polymer Brush Surfaces, Cassandra M. Reese
Dissertations
The combination of surface-initiated polymerization (SIP) and post-polymerization (PPM) serves as a powerful approach to fabricate complex, multifunctional polymer films, which can be precisely tuned for desired surface engineering applications. Careful manipulation of PPM parameters such as reaction conditions, the tethered brush parameters, and the physical properties of the unbound post-modifier greatly influence the depth of penetration of the post-modifier and the polymer brush compositional heterogeneity. This dissertation focuses on engineering polymer brush surfaces with multifunctional chemistries and tunable morphologies by investigating the PPM parameters that dictate the distribution of post-modifiers on grafted polymer brush surfaces.
The first chapter of …
Bioinspired Glycopolymers: Models To Investigate The Effect Of Saccharide Structure And Concentration On Amyloid Beta Aggregation, Pradipta Kumar Das
Bioinspired Glycopolymers: Models To Investigate The Effect Of Saccharide Structure And Concentration On Amyloid Beta Aggregation, Pradipta Kumar Das
Dissertations
Aggregation and subsequent deposition of amyloid-β (Aβ) peptide on neuronal cell membranes have been implicated as a cause of Alzheimer’s disease. Gangliosides in their clustered form seed and promote the Aβ aggregation process. However, the effects of the structure and the concentration of ganglioside saccharides on Aβ aggregation are not well understood. We investigated how the specific structure of saccharides (β-D-galactose and β-D-glucose) affect the aggregation pathways, kinetics, and the aggregated structures of Aβ via in vitro experiments. The effects of the local concentration of saccharides on the Aβ aggregation were also investigated.
To mimic the multivalent effect of the …