title: Surface Stiffness--a Parameter for Sensing the Chirality of Saccharides.
abstract: Surface stiffness is considered a key parameter for designing high-performance implantable materials and artificial extracellular matrices because of its substantial effects on cell behavior. How to transform biomolecule recognition events, particularly chiral recognition, into stiffness change on material surfaces is biologically essential but very challenging for chemists. Here, we report a chirality-triggered stiffness transition on a smart polymer film, which consists of flexible polyethylenimine (PEI) main chains grafted with dipeptide units capable of discriminating chiral monosaccharides. The polymer film became substantially softer after interacting with L-ribose and became more rigid after interacting with D-ribose (the basic building block of DNA and RNA). This chiral effect provides a new method for determining the enantiomeric purity of an L/D-ribose mixture and facilitates the chiral separation of deoxyribose racemates as well as the separation of diverse mono-, di-, and oligosaccharides. These are three puzzle problems in carbohydrate chemistry. Furthermore, taking advantage of the significant differences in the surface stiffness, the proliferation of fibroblast cells on the polymeric surfaces can also be regulated by chiral biomolecules.
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Advanced Technology for Materials Synthesis and Processing, Wuhan University of Technology , 122 Luoshi Road, Wuhan, 430070, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Ziyu
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Lv
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Separation Science for Analytical Chemistry, Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences , 457 Zhongshan Road, Dalian, 116023, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Xiuling
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Advanced Technology for Materials Synthesis and Processing, Wuhan University of Technology , 122 Luoshi Road, Wuhan, 430070, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Zhonghui
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Freshwater Ecology and Biotechnology, Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences , Wuhan, 430072, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Ji
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Separation Science for Analytical Chemistry, Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences , 457 Zhongshan Road, Dalian, 116023, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Cheng
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Advanced Technology for Materials Synthesis and Processing, Wuhan University of Technology , 122 Luoshi Road, Wuhan, 430070, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Peng
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Xiong
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Advanced Technology for Materials Synthesis and Processing, Wuhan University of Technology , 122 Luoshi Road, Wuhan, 430070, P. R. China.|School of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering and Life Science, Wuhan University of Technology , 122 Luoshi Road, Wuhan, 430070, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Taolei
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Sun
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Advanced Technology for Materials Synthesis and Processing, Wuhan University of Technology , 122 Luoshi Road, Wuhan, 430070, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Guangyan
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Qing
mesh_terms: D002241:Carbohydrates / Q000737:chemistry*; D011094:Polyethyleneimine / Q000737:chemistry; D011108:Polymers / Q000737:chemistry*; D013237:Stereoisomerism; D023822:Tissue Engineering / Q000379:methods*
chemical_list: D002241:Carbohydrates; D011108:Polymers; D011094:Polyethyleneimine
keywords: chiral separation; stimuli-responsive films; surface stiffness; tissue engineering; viscoelasticity