Fabrication of Micropatterned Dipeptide Hydrogels by Acoustic Trapping of Stimulus-Responsive Coacervate Droplets.

Acoustic standing waves offer an excellent opportunity to trap and spatially manipulate colloidal objects. This noncontact technique is used for the in situ formation and patterning in aqueous solution of 1D or 2D arrays of pH-responsive coacervate microdroplets comprising poly(diallyldimethylammonium) chloride and the dipeptide N-fluorenyl-9-methoxy-carbonyl-D-alanine-D-alanine. Decreasing the pH of the preformed droplet arrays results in dipeptide nanofilament self-assembly and subsequent formation of a micropatterned supramolecular hydrogel that can be removed as a self-supporting monolith. Guest molecules such as molecular dyes, proteins, and oligonucleotides are sequestered specifically within the coacervate droplets during acoustic processing to produce micropatterned hydrogels containing spatially organized functional components. Using this strategy, the site-specific isolation of multiple enzymes to drive a catalytic cascade within the micropatterned hydrogel films is exploited.

Artificial cytoskeletal structures within enzymatically active bio-inorganic protocells.

The fabrication of enzymatically active, semi-permeable bio-inorganic protocells capable of self-assembling a cytoskeletal-like interior and undergoing small-molecule dephosphorylation reactions is described. Reversible disassembly of an amino acid-derived supramolecular hydrogel within the internalized reaction space is used to tune the enzymatic activity of the nanoparticle-bounded inorganic compartments.

A new route to high yield sugars from biomass: phosphoric-sulfuric acid.

We have developed a simple and effective route for the high yield extraction of sugars from cellulosic based biomass. This process uses a combination of a cellulose decrystallization step with a mixture of phosphoric and sulfuric acid, followed by a hydrolysis step producing sugars (xylose and glucose) with yields of approximately 90%.