(83z) Controllable Synthesis of Peptide Polymers in Microfluidic REACTOR

Recently, many biopolymers with interesting functionalities have been developed and applied in various fields. In particular, synthetic biopolymers including polypeptides are very important in fields such as biomedical and tissue engineering. Such functional polymers have been significantly developed owing to their specific properties such as various biological activities, biodegradability, and biocompatibility. Although several useful polymers were developed, it is usually effort and time consuming to obtain useful polymers which can be commercialized. One of the underlying problems deals with design and screening of polymer molecules. Although there have been demands for high-throughput and combinatorial synthesis system to rapidly and effectively obtain useful polymers, it is generally difficult to control polymer properties such as average molecular weight and molecular weight distribution, thus, a method which would enable control of polymerization reactions is desirable.

Microfluidic system possesses several advantages for polymer synthesis over the conventional reaction systems. Reactions using micromixing devices give better results than that of batchwise reactions.

Taking into account the properties of microfluidic systems, we applied microreaction technology in biopolymer synthesis. In the present study, we performed synthesis of peptide polymer such as collagen and elastin model peptides. First, we examined microreactors used for polyamino acid synthesis. However, only small molecular weight polymers (Mn<10000) were obtained. Thus, we developed continuous-flow circulation microreaction system to obtain higher molecular weight species. By using this system, we could obtain higher molecular weight polymers (Mn>10000) at nallower molecular weight distribution (Mw/Mn=1.2).Details of this system will be presented.