The use of natural proteins as building blocks for materials design holds tremendous promises in many applications, but very often, their large-scale industrial production remains difficult. The chemical design of polymeric analogues is an alternative approach to bioengineering in a context were synthetic polypeptides can partially reproduce some of the structural or functional features of their natural models. Using chemistry, the most economical and efficient process to prepare synthetic peptide chains is a one-step polymerization process, the ring-opening polymerization (ROP) of N-carboxyanhydride monomers. This controlled polymerization process 1) allows the preparation of polymers made of amino acids in both, good yields and large quantities and 2) is an ideal way to create protein mimics structures for advanced material design. Synthetic polypeptide polymers are simple macromolecules compared to natural proteins, in which an amino-acid is repeated many times, retaining the tendency to adopt ordered secondary conformations such as α-helices or β-sheets, a property that is rare in polymer science. Moreover, polypeptide polymers can easily undergo secondary structure transitions by tailoring amino-acid side chains, a critical feature to prepare advanced nanoparticles, gels, membranes and surface coatings. In this context, the talk proposed will illustrate how the combination of coordination chemistry or DNA binding to polypeptide polymers can be used to prepare smart polymeric systems with biomimetic structuring switches.

Synthetic polypeptide polymers as simplified analogues of conjugated proteins

2019 Fall National Meeting

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