Gibson Group News
GibsonGroup at ACS
The Group will be giving 5 talks at the forth coming ACS National Meeting in San Francisco, 2-5 April. This will cover a broad range of topics inlcuding polymer synthesis, diagnostics, toxin neutralization and antimicrobials, polymer self assembly and tissue cryopreservation!
Come along to the following Talks to hear more!
Matt Gibson
Rational design of antifreeze-protein mimetic materials to enable the cryopreservation of cells
Wednesday, April, 05, 2017 from 11:15 AM - 11:35 AM
123 - Moscone Center
Matt Gibson
GlycoNanoparticle barcodes for pathogen identification
Tuesday, April, 04, 2017 from 10:30 AM - 10:50 AM
2012 - Moscone Center
Applied Biosensing Based on Functional Colloids
8:30 AM - 10:50 AM
Matt Gibson
Glycopolymers with selectivity as well as avidity through macromolecular enginnering
Tuesday, April, 04, 2017 from 8:35 AM - 9:05 AM
Grand Ballroom West - Grand Hyatt San Francisco
Lewis Blackman
Wednesday 5th April, 13:25 – 13:45
Room 121 Moscone Center
Session: Next Generation Smart Materials
Lewis Blackman
Thursday 6th April, 10:20 – 10:40
Room 123 Moscone Center
Session: Polymers & Biomimicry
Group Outreach for World TB Day
On Friday 24th March members of the group took part in World TB day. The aim of the day was to reach out to local communities to inform them of the re-occurance of TB as a disease not just from low-income countries and is no longer a disease consigned to history. There were 10.4 million new cases in 2015 and 1.8 million deaths globally. In order to increase public awareness, on World TB day, we went to Cannon park shopping center to spread the word that TB is still not defeated. Activities for both adults and children, as twitter photograph competition, cross-word puzzle and coloring competition gave the opportunity not only to inform the public about key facts of TB but also to win prizes. Over 350 people visited the stall during the day.
Chris Stubbs Invited to Join SCI Materials Chemistry Committee
Chris, a 2nd year PhD student in the Gibson group, was recently invited to join the materials chemistry subcommittee of the society of chemical industry. This is a group comprised of PhD students, post-doctoral researchers, and early career academics as well as recent graduates and post-doctoral staff from within the materials chemistry industry. The intent of the subcommittee is to be responsible for representing the materials division of the SCI on social media, whilst also increasing its representation within universities, and encouraging collaboration between their industrial partners and early career principal investigators. The subcommittee is currently arranging social events, conferences and talks which engage final year undergraduates and PhD students, with the intention of encouraging them to pursue careers within the chemical industry. At the most recent meeting, Chris gave a talk entitled "Synthetic Polymers to Mimic Antifreeze Proteins".
Group Members Win Technology/Business Competition
Ben Martyn, Ben Graham. Trisha Bailey and Chris Stubbs have won first place in a Business, Innovation and Commercialisation competition for most investable pitch. This was organised by Warwick Ventures as part of our Postgraduate Transferrable skills program. Well done all!
Matt Gibson gives seminar at Birmingham University
On thursday, 9th March, Professor Matthew Gibson, gave a seminar at the University of Birmingham. This was part of the Physical Sciences for Health series. In this, Matt discussed the groups past resutls in designed new polymers to mimic antifreeze proteins. He showed the evolution from simple mimics to more advanced polymers and even some non-antifreeze proteins, which have surprising antifreeze-like activity. He also introduced the relatively new topic (to the group) on controlling ice nucleation. The medical and biotechnological applications were also discussed. He even managed to link cruical science discoveries to moments from the Empire Strikes Back...
Caroline wins poster prize
Caroline won the first place poster prize at the Symposium on Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, held at the University of Birmingham in December. This is her third poster prize to-date.
Paper published in Biomacromolecules
Our latest work investigating the role of regiochemistry in the design of synthetic ice recrystallisation inhibiting materials has been published in Biomacromolecules. We have previously shown that poly(ampholytes) (mixed positive and negative charges) are an exciting class of synthetic materials which display IRI activity while also being highly tuneable, compared to poly(vinyl alcohol), the only other potent polymer IRI. In this work we overcame two challenges of making ampholytes by conventional polymerization; Obtaining an exact 1:1 ratio of the charges and ensuring a perfectly alternating structure. This was achieved by using maleic anhydride copolymers, which has a propensity to cross propagate. This level of sequence control is unusual for most polymerisation reactions and can only be achieved through specific monomer combinations. The activity of these polymers with a range of comonomers and pendant amine groups was investigated and increasingly hydrophobic side chains (but not backbones) increased activity.
These polymers were then compared to a structurally similar polymer in which the charged groups are randomly incorporated, which had less activity, demonstrating for the first time that polymer sequence actually has a large impact on this property.
Read the paper here
Paper published in Journal of Polymer Science Part A
Our latest work has been published in the Journal of Polymer Science Part A. In this work we have synthesised and characterised gold nanoparticles coated with RAFT-synthesised polymer chains. We describe how the two different polymer coatings effect the properties of the nanoparticles, in the context of grafting density, buffer stability, and in a lectin binding assay. We found that poly(oligoethylene glycol methacrylates), despite being widely used particle coatings, lead to low grafting densities which in turn resulted in lower stability in biological buffers. In comparison poly(vinylpyrrolidones) resulted in stable particles with higher grafting densities due to the compact size of each monomer unit. This work forms a link between our previous studies on the polymer coating of gold nanoparticles and the surface grafting of polymers onto gold and glass supports. These results will guide the development of new nanoparticle biosensors with enhanced specificity, affinity, and stability both within our research group and the wider scientific community.
Read the paper here