Preamble: Anton is the Leader of the Applied Chemistry and Translational Biomaterials Group. His research focuses on the development of innovative chemistries, delivery systems and biotechnologies to address challenges in the biomedical, mining, and environmental sectors.
Abstract: Self-assembled polymeric delivery platforms based on colloidal aggregates have promise for the delivery of...
Surfaces covered with densely tethered polymer chains possess desirable properties and are ubiquitous in natural and human-made systems. These properties stem from the diffuse structure of these polymer brush interfaces; consequently, resolving their structure is key to designing systems with better performance. NR has been widely used for studying these systems as it is the only technique...
Ionic liquids are a novel class of solvents with ultra-low vapour pressure and tunable liquid properties. Among them, protic ionic liquids (PILs) are particularly effective solvents for self-assembly of surfactants and lipids into micelles, vesicles, liquid crystals and microemulsions. This is exemplified by alkylammonium PILs, which are also cheap, easily prepared and can be readily...
Polymer brushes are dense arrays of surface-tethered polymers that possess desirable qualities, such as lubricity and fouling resistance, provided that their structure and chemistry are correctly tuned [1]. Surface-initiated polymerisation (SIP) is the primary method for synthesising these brushes with the physicochemical properties required to imbue surfaces with the aforementioned qualities....
Single-molecule magnets (SMMs) are metal organic compounds which exhibit magnetic hysteresis and slow magnetic relaxation at low temperature. They have potential applications in high density data storage, quantum computing, and molecular spintronics. Coordination complexes of the trivalent lanthanoid (Ln(III)) ions are the current best performing SMMs, with examples showing hysteresis above...
Proteins are an important part of biotechnology and can be utilised for a range of applications and industries1. But the stability and solubility of the protein is often a limiting factor, so ionic liquids (ILs) have been tested as an alternative solvent due to their wide scope and tailorable properties. They are reported to increase protein activity2, solubility, long term and thermal...
Model cellular membranes are often used to understand the interactions with biomolecules and nanoparticles[1], but the effects of such interactions go beyond molecular binding and include processes such as biomembrane restructuring and molecular exchange that may lead to changes in the structure and composition of the interacting nanoparticles.
Here I will present our most recent work aiming...
In serial crystallography of membrane protein crystals, high-viscosity flow injectors deliver micron-sized crystals to the x-ray beam. The protein crystals are often injected embedded in the lipidic cubic phase (LCP) media, monoolein (MO), in which they were grown. The self-assembled structure of this media is easily impacted by the performance of the injector, e.g. pressure and gas flow...
Protic ionic liquids (PILs) are the largest known solvent class capable of promoting surfactant self-assembly. However, PILs are increasingly used as mixtures with molecular solvents, such as water, to reduce their cost, viscosity and melting point, and the self-assembly promoting properties of these mixtures are largely unknown. Here we investigated the critical micelle concentration (CMC) of...
Contrast matching and contrast variation in neutron scattering provide unparalleled power for understanding the structure, function, and dynamics of a selected component in a multicomponent system. A sophisticated contrast study often requires the availability of deuterated molecules in which deuterium atoms are introduced in a predictable and controlled fashion to replace protons. This can be...
Lipid-based liquid-crystals are biocompatible nanomaterials offering selective and ‘smart’ drug-release properties which are an emerging technology in the research and development pipeline. Over the last decade, research on these nanomaterials has focused on their behaviour in response to physicochemical phenomena and after loading with pharmaceutical cargo. Over the next decade, research aims...
Recent work has found that the identity of a surfactant's counter-ion can affect the critical micelle concentration, and the size and shape of resultant micelles in ionic liquid (IL) and choline-based deep eutectic solvents.[1,2] This indicates the presence of ion specific effects for micellisation in these neoteric solvents despite their high ionic strength.[3] This project examines this...
Protic ionic liquids (PILs) are cost efficient “designer” solvents which can be tailored to have properties suitable for a broad range of applications. PILs are also being combined with molecular solvents to enable more control over the solvent environment, driven by a need to reduce their cost and viscosity. This also leads to greater biocompatability.
In this presentation I will discuss our...
The development of real-time, highly sensitive chemical sensors for the detection of very low analyte concentrations is of significant interest and importance for monitoring levels of harmful chemicals in the environment. The unique properties of the rare-earth metals enables sharp and narrow luminescent signals to be obtained. The incorporation of rare-earth ions into sensor systems offers...
Designer lipid colloids are being increasingly studied for the delivery of drugs and nutrients. These nanoparticles can have different internal nanostructures and different lipidic composition. Cyclopropanated derivatives of commonly used monoacylglycerols show substantial differences in self-assembled structures, and formations of nanostructured nanoparticles. Most remarkably, small...
The development of carbon-neutral energy-generation is critical to combatting climate change. One such technology is the development of next-generation ion conductors for solid-oxide fuel cells (SOFCs). SOFCs offer a more efficient method of extracting energy from hydrogen or hydrocarbon fuels than current combustion engines due to their one-step chemical process. However, a bottleneck to the...
Characterising the supramolecular organisation of macromolecules in the presence of varying degrees of disorder remains one of the challenges of macromolecular research. Discotic liquid crystals (DLCs) are an ideal model system for understanding the role of disorder on multiple length scales. Consisting of rigid aromatic cores with flexible alkyl fringes, they can be considered as...
Lyotropic liquid crystal phases (LCPs) are widely studied for diverse applications, including protein crystallization and drug delivery. The structure and properties of LCPs vary widely depending on composition, temperature and pressure. Therefore, high-throughput structural characterisation, such as small-angle x-ray scattering (SAXS), is important to cover meaningfully large compositional...
A polycrystalline sample of the Mn(III) complex K3[Mn(CN)6] was measured on the cold neutron time-of-flight spectrometer Pelican at ACNS in October 2020, under a range of applied magnetic fields of 0 ≤ B ≤ 7 T. The spectra obtained in zero-field clearly show a pair of magnetic excitations centered at ca. 9.5 meV, in accord with previous measurements on IN4 at ILL and MARS at PSI. In...
Ionic liquids (ILs) are liquids that are comprised entirely of ions. IL solutions have been widely studied for biochemical applications in recent decades, where their ions interact with proteins and can profoundly regulate their properties and functionalities. However, it is challenging to gain an in-depth understanding on the solvent effect on proteins and specific ion-protein interactions at...
Understanding the structure formation induced by specific fabrication method is crucial due to the complex interplay between their microstructure and the imposed deformation during fabrication. In this talk, we will focus on extrusion based printing, where 3D structures are created through continuously depositing material layer-upon-layer. Consequently, both polymer rheology and the gel...
