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Antimicrobial Materials Via Thiol-Ene Chemistry, Dahlia Amato

Dissertations

With the increasing prevalence of antimicrobial resistance, the escalation of opportunistic/pathogenic infections is a looming global crisis. To avoid the pitfalls of conventional antibiotics, this dissertation focuses on developing macromolecular solutions to develop novel antimicrobial materials based on essential oils (thymol, carvacrol, and aldehydes). It is well established that essential oil derivatives exhibit high potency towards a wide range of pathogenic microbes. The rapid photopolymerization kinetics, limited by-products, and homogeneous network formation afforded by thiol-ene photopolymerization are utilized to either encapsulate essential oil derivatives or convert them into monomers which can subsequently be incorporated into new antimicrobial materials with new …