화학공학소재연구정보센터
Journal of the American Chemical Society, Vol.130, No.30, 9836-9843, 2008
Antimicrobial polymers prepared by ROMP with unprecedented selectivity: A molecular construction kit approach
Synthetic Mimics of Antimicrobial Peptides (SMAMPs) imitate natural host-defense pepticles, a vital component of the body's immune system. This work presents a molecular construction kit that allows the easy and versatile synthesis of a broad variety of facially amphiphilic oxanorbomene-cle rived monomers. Their ring-opening metathesis polymerization (ROMP) and deprotection provide several series of SMAMPs. Using amphiphilicity, monomer feed ratio, and molecular weight as parameters, polymers with 533 times higher selectivitiy (selecitviy = hemolytic concentration/minimum inhibitory concentration) for bacteria over mammalian cells were discovered. Some of these polymers were 50 times more selective for Gram-positive over Gram-negative bacteria while other polymers surprisingly showed the opposite preference. This kind of "double selectivity" (bacteria over mammalian and one bacterial type over another) is unprecedented in other polymer systems and is attributed to the monomer's facial amphiphilicity.