Polystyrene nanospheres, functionalization

Two-dimensional polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (2D-PAGE), which has been successfully used to establish a correlation between adsorbed proteins and in vivo behavior of polystyrene carriers coated with Poloxamers (Blunk etal, 1994) could be a helpful tool to study competitive plasma protein adsorption on PEG-coated nanospheres as a function of PEG chain length and surface density. Indeed, the relevance of the adsorbed plasma proteins (and their ratios and conformations) with respect to the in vivo fate of the particles remains to be uncovered. 

More specifically, the synthesis of micelles as a scaffold for the formation of metal particles has been achieved (Loginova et al, 2004). This has been demonstrated very effectively by the group of Bronstein, who has utilized polystyrene as a reactive polymer to functionalize with molybdenum hexacarbonyl using UV radiation followed by reaction with H2S to afford MoS encapsulated micelles. In related work Chu has reported the use of block copolymer micelles as template s for the formation of hollow molybdenum spheres whose diameter is equivalent to the size of the micellar cores (about 5 nm) (Lui et al, 2000). More recently Xie and coworkers have used micelle-assisted fabrication of necklace-shaped molybdenum disulfide nanospheres (Xiong et al, 2003). In this work, the authors used the aggregation-driven transformation of surfactants at low temperatures to form a necklace-shaped assembly of amorphous M0S3 nanospheres. 

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