Polymerization onto biological templates: a new way to obtain bioartificial polymeric materials

The radical polymerisation of synthetic monomers onto biological templates can be recognised as a technique for the straightforward preparation of bioartificial polymeric materials, polymer blends based materials in which interactions at the molecular level lead to enhanced properties. In the first part the polymerisations of different acrylic monomers in the presence of synthetic templates are presented as study models. The second part deals with preliminary experiments carried out using natural polymers as templates. Dilatometric and conductimetric measurements were used to study the kinetics of the template polymerisation reactions. Results indicate that the reactions proceed according to different mechanisms depending on the interactions between functional groups present in the systems. In many instances the results of the characterisation analyses have shown that the polymer complexes obtained by template polymerisation have a more ordered structure than the complexes prepared by simple mixing the two polymers. In addition conductimetry has revealed as a very simple diagnostic tool for identifying the template reaction mechanism.