Doctoral students seminar (January 25, 2022)

Synthesis and Characterization of Poly(Aib)
Matthias Rohmer

and

Simulation of Hybrid Polymers
Thomas Kunze

date: January 25, 15.00
online seminar
chair: Anna-Maria

Abstracts

Synthesis and Characterization of Poly(Aib)
Matthias Rohmer

2-Aminoisobutyric Acid (Aib) is one of the few achiral amino acids and as such it can adopt left and right handed helical structures without any preferences. By adding a chiral group at the end of the chain a chiral information can be induced in the polymer chain. The chiral information preceeds through the chain which makes this system a good model for signal transmission. These polymers are polymerized by solution polymerization but it is limited in the chain length. We need a new method to overcome this limitation such as crystal state polymerization.

Simulation of Hybrid Polymers
Thomas Kunze

The manipulation and understanding of aggregation patterns in proteins and peptides is the key to cure several fatal diseases e.g. Alzheimer’s or Pakinson’s. One type of control is the insertion of synthetic polymers into existing peptides and proteins. It is possible to calculate small peptides or proteins with classical molecular dynamics simulations, however with increasing size the convergence of the system becomes a bigger to unsolvable problem.This is why we are investigating model systems with small peptide segments connected by small PE chains. As the convergence of such systems is also difficult to grasp, we are focussing on determining any characteristic conformational motifs (analogous to micro-phase separation or colloidal segment aggregation) and its dependence on the chemistry of hybrid molecules, specifically amino acid type and length. A particular focus lies on the attempt to identify conformational patterns induced by the type of philicity of the polymer segments: while the PE chains are the textbook example of hydrophobic molecules the charged peptide segments have a distinctly hydrophilic character.