Templated Microreactors: A Synthetic Approach to Enzyme Entrapment

DARA VAN GOUGH; ALEJANDRO WOLOSIUK; PAUL V. BRAUN

Chicago, IL - EEEUU

Congreso; 233rd American Chemical Society National Meeting; 2007

American Chemical Society

INTRODUCTION Hollow particles have attracted considerable attention due to their potential as microcontainers, microreactors, and drug delivery vessels. However, it is necessary to add functionality to these particles, for example, by entrapping an active species (i.e. catalyst, chemical species, etc.) within the core of hollow particles or by varying the shell material to make it selectively permeable. In this preprint, we explore the entrapment of species of interest within hollow particles and ion exchange reactions as a method to expand our repertoire of shell materials. Typically, a bottom up core-shell approach is used to synthesize these particles, with  typical core materials including polymers.1,2 microbubbles 3, and silica.4 Additionally, incorporating a periodic nanostructure is of interest in order to control the transport properties of the material. To this end, we previously imparted a periodic nanostructure into the capsule walls via templating with a lyotropic liquid crystal. 5 This approach takes advantage of the self-assembly of an amphiphilic molecule in the presence of water into various phases; the periodicity of each phase is dependent on the respective lengths of the hydrophilic and hydrophobic portions of the amphiphile. Specifically, we presented a mild synthetic approach for the synthesis of nanostructured zinc sulfide hollow spheres, schematic shown in Figure 1, and demonstrated the encapsulation of gold nanoparticles.5