Thin polymer coatings present a method to modify the surface properties of underlying substrates. Polymer-coated surfaces have been used as anticorrosive materials, surfaces with special wetting properties, antifriction materials, and as materials for biom ...
Protein Engineering, especially protein post-translational modification (PTM), ex-tends proteomes in a more complex way than one can expect from analysis of their encod-ing genomes. It can activate or deactivate certain catalytic functions, add new desired ...
Nitrogen-containing compounds are an important class of molecules in medicinal chemistry, chemical biology, biochemistry, material sciences or environmental sciences. Organic nitrogen occurs in many forms, ranging from small building blocks such as urea, a ...
Lignin is a renewable aromatic polymer that due to its abundance and unique chemical structure is a promising candidate to replace aromatic materials that are currently sourced from fossil oil. The same structure of lignin poses however drawbacks for its v ...
Metal-organic Frameworks (MOFs) are a class of crystalline porous materials with exceptionally high surface area, chemical tunability and stability. Due to alarming CO2 emission and global concern, research is focused on developing porous materials like MO ...
Polymer brushes are a specific class of polymer thin films in which each chain is tethered to the underlying substrate via one chain end. In sufficiently densely grafted assemblies, the individual polymer chains are forced into an extended chain conformati ...
Polymeric coatings that can undergo effective functionalization with ligands and (bio)molecules necessary for intended applications are widely employed to engineer functional interfaces. Herein, amine-reactive polymer brushes are fabricated using a succini ...
This Thesis is built around 4 topics, which share in common that they all take advantage of the assets of controlled radical polymerization to either (i) prepare well-defined model systems to address fundamental research questions with regard to the sensit ...
Advances in controlled radical polymerization over the past two decades have transformed the ability to produce molecularly well-defined, chain-end tethered polymer brush films. The assets of controlled radical polymerization reactions have impacted the sy ...
The introduction of interchain cross-links in surface-grafted polymer brushes increases the robustness and mechanical properties of these thin polymer films. In most cases, cross-linked polymer brushes contain permanent interchain cross-links. The use of r ...
