The innovation engine for new materials

Sono-RAFT, SNAPPs and Superbugs

Seminar Group: 

Speaker: 

Prof. Greg Qiao

Address: 

Department of Chemical Engineering
The University of Melbourne, Vic. 31010 Australia

Date: 

Monday, August 28, 2017 - 2:00pm

Location: 

MRL Room 2053

Host: 

Prof. Craig Hawker

This talk will introduce our recently developed two areas of research based on mordent polymer chemistry. The first area is on our latest development of new methods to activate RAFT polymerization process.  It will cover Photo-RAFT,1 Fenton-RAFT,2 Bio-RAFT and Sono-RAFT3. As shown in Fig 1(ia), monomers are polymerized under ultrasound wave in water in the present of a RAFT agent and the polydispersity is usually below 1.05. The polymerization can be turned on or off by simple switching the power of ultrasound device (Fig (ib)). The second area will introduce our recently developed structurally nanoengineered antibacterial peptide polymers (SNAPPs) (Figure 1(iic)) which can kill multi-drug resistant gram-negative superbugs without using any antibiotics and without causing toxicity to healthy cells.4 Fig 1(iid, & e) demonstrates how the outer membrane of superbugs are “snapped” away by SNAPPs.

 

 

1 (a) McKenzie, T. G.; Fu, Q.; Wong, E. H. H.; Dunstan, D. E.; Qiao, G. G. Macromolecules 2015, 48, 3864. (b) Fu, Q.; McKenzie, T. G.; Ren, J. M.; Tan, S.; Nam, E.; Qiao, G. G. SCIENTIFIC REPORTS20166, doi:10.1038/srep20779

2 Reyhani, A. McKenzie, T. G. Ranji-Burachaloo, H. Fu, Q. and Qiao, G. G. Chem. Eur. J. 2017, 23, 7221.

3 McKenzie,T.G.; Colombo,E.; Fu, Q.; Ashokkumar, M.; G.G. Qiao. Angew. Chemi., 2017provisionally accepted.

4 Lam, S. J.; O'Brien-Simpson, N. M.; Pantarat, N.; Sulistio, A.; Wong, E. H. H.; Chen, Y. -Y.; Lenzo, J. C.; Holden, J. A.; Blencowe, A.; Reynolds, E. C.; Qiao, G. G. Nature Microbiol. 20161, 16162.