Lu Hua's research group in the School of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering has made a series of progress in the study of in situ induced ring-opening polymerization of proteins

Protein-polymer conjugates are a class of hybrid molecules that connect biological macromolecules with synthetic polymers, and have important application value

Progress 1: Water acceleration effect promotes in situ synthesis of protein-polyproline conjugates

Polyproline is a neutral, water-soluble polyaaccharide derived from the open-loop polymerization of proline N-carboxylic intracyclic anhydride (ProNCA), which usually requires strict anhydrous conditions and takes up to a week

Due to the mild reaction conditions, ease of operation, and ease of purification, they further used protein lysine residues to trigger ProNCA ring-opening polymerization to obtain in situ-grown protein-polyproline conjugates

Figure 1.

The work was published in the National Science Review, with Dr.

Progress 2: Aggregation-induced polymerization effect facilitates in situ synthesis of protein-polydisulfide conjugates

Polydisulfide (PDS) prepared by thiol-induced 1,2-dithiopentane ring-opening polymerization is a class of degradable polymers

In a work recently published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, they continued the idea of "increasing the effective concentration of monomers to promote polymerization" and proposed the concept

Figure 2.

Lu Jianhua, a 2018 doctoral student at the School of Chemistry of Peking University, is the first author of the paper, and Professor Lu Hua is the corresponding author; Wang Huan, a researcher at the School of Chemistry of Peking University, and Professor Lin Yao of the University of Connecticut, are the paper collaborators