Traballo de Fin de Grao en Química. Curso 2014-2015Polymers research field has been deeply studied during the last decades. The knowledge of their structure is essential in order to relate it to their properties and applications. These studies include the synthesis, characterization and structure elucidation of polyphenylacetylenes, which adopt helical structures. The helicity can be tuned towards the left or right handed helical sense by the addition of external stimuli such as temperature, pH, solvent polarity, chiral molecules or metal ions, among others. Because of that, these polymers can act as potential sensors, among other applications.
On the other hand, gold nanoparticles have remarkable properties which makes them really useful: they can be synthetized with different sizes and they also can be easily functionalized with a wide range of ligands. They also present excellent optical and photothermal properties.
The conjugation of natural polymers with gold nanoparticles has set a revolution, especially in the field of biomedicine. Nevertheless, the use of synthetic polymers as coating for gold nanoparticles has not been deeply studied.
Here, we present a system based on the assembly of gold nanoparticles and a synthetic copolymer composed by polyphenylacetylenes. It was proved that the presence of AuNP does not eliminate the ability of the copolymer to respond to external stimuli
