Gibson Group News

We have a major research interest in how we can develop new materials, inspired by extremophiles, which can bind or modulate ice growth and also macromolecular cryoprotectants to protect cells/proteins from cold damage. A key challenge is that discovering new materials which affect ice growth is challenging (compared to the well known ice binding proteins). In our latest paper we report that polymer nanoparticles, derived from PISA (polymerization-induced self-assembly) had the surprising property of preventing ice recrystallization (growth). What was surprising was that the coronal polymer (water soluble outside parts) alone had no activity, but in the PISA particle format showed a remarkable enhancement, with larger particles being more active than small. One polymer, polyvinylpyrrolidone, appear to bind ice crystals when in particle format, which has not been previously reported. The results are really exciting as these are really very easy to synthesise and a huge range of monomers and particle morphologies can be accessed and will let us explore these properties. We also showed these polymers do not nucleate ice formation, as few materials do. This was important as large assemblies of ice binding proteins have been shown to nucleate ice, but that was not seen here.

The paper has been published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, read here -

Polymer Self-Assembly Induced Enhancement of Ice Recrystallization Inhibition