Our latest work has been published in ACS Macro Letters. In this work we describe a new method to covalent attached synthetic polymers to cell surfaces, enabling us to bring new functionality to them, without resorting to genetic methods. There already exist many chemistry for targetting cell surfaces, such as simple NHS esters, or lipid insertion, but we wanted to form a directed, covalent bond. Glycan metabolic labeling was exploited, whereby we added an azido-functional ManNac (a sugar) to the cells, which can be processed such that it presented an azide on the cell surface as sialic acid. We then made telechelic polymers used RAFT, adding an azide reactive strained alkyne at one end, and a fluorophore or biotin at the other. We would able to show selective conjugation and coating of the cells using these polymers, with no evidence of cytoxocity nor of morphological changes (i.e. the cells looked happy). To show that we can use this method to change the functionality of the cells, we were able to recruit streptavidin to the cell surfaces, targetting the biotin units on the polymer, which did not occur without the polymer. We think this method could be broadly used to add synthetic polymers to cell surfaces to modify their function, which may have application in therapies, cell tracking and also to ask fundamental questions about how this modification affects cell function.

Read the paper here

Engineering Cell Surfaces by Covalent Grafting of Synthetic Polymers to Metabolically-Labeled Glycans