Project Abstract:

Conjugated polymers for chemical and biological sensors are of great interest because of the changes in their optical and conducting properties in presence of analytes. In particular, water soluble polymers offer powerful tools for the trace detection of analytes in biological environments. In general, ionic conjugated polymers have been applied in biosensor schemes; however these systems have some disadvantages: (i) the solution’s pH and ionic strength have to be adjusted to prevent aggregation of the conjugated polymers (ii) non-specific electrostatic interaction between ionic polymers and biomolecules such as proteins and DNA will reduce the target specificity. By careful design of conducting polymers incorporated with water solubilizing neutral functional groups, we hope to investigate recognition and sensing of various analytes of different origin (chemical or biological). Another area of this project is focusing on metal ion sensor applications. By considering the good complexing ability of the pyridine, bipyridine, terpyridine, pyrazine molecules with the metal ions, group of polymers consisting of alternate phenylene and pyridine/ bipyridine /terpyridine/ pyrazine molecules are designed. We expect these polymers have effective sensor properties for variety of metals and their lanthanide metal complexation is expected to have the potential applications in photonics.