Structuring biopolymer compositions and fi lms based on them

Data on the properties of biopolymer compositions modifi ed with polysaccharides and structured by glyoxal are presented. The mechanical, optical, and dielectric properties of composite fi lms are estimated as a function of the mass fraction of the polysaccharide components, the consumption of crosslinking reagent, and the holding time of the composition.

PhoX – an IMAC-enrichable Crosslinking Reagent

Chemical crosslinking mass spectrometry is rapidly emerging as a prominent technique to study protein structures. Structural information is obtained by covalently connecting peptides in close proximity by small reagents and identifying the resulting peptide pairs by mass spectrometry. However, sub-stoichiometric reaction efficiencies render routine detection of crosslinked peptides problematic. Here we present a new tri-functional crosslinking reagent, termed PhoX, which is decorated with a stable phosphonic acid handle. This makes the crosslinked peptides amenable to the well-established IMAC enrichment. The handle allows for 300x enrichment efficiency and 97% specificity, dramatically reducing measurement time and improving data quality. We exemplify the approach on various model proteins and protein complexes, e.g. resulting in a structural model of the LRP1/RAP complex. PhoX is also applicable to whole cell lysates. When focusing the database search on ribosomal proteins, our first attempt resulted in 355 crosslinks, out-performing current efforts in less measurement time.

Studies on the Crosslinked Multiblock Sulfonated Poly(arylene Ether Sulfone) Membranes for Fuel Cell Applications

Polymers based on sulfonated multiblock copoly(arylene ether sulfone)s were prepared successfully by the reaction between a phenoxide-end-capped hydrophilic oligomer and a fluoride-end-capped hydrophobic oligomer. They were subsequently used as the starting material to prepare crosslinking membranes (cbSPAES) using P2O5 as the crosslinking reagent during the membrane casting procedure. The fundamental properties of the resulting crosslinked multiblock membranes, such as water uptake, size change, proton conductivity and hydrolytic stability were investigated in details.