Finneran, Dylan
Submitted to the University of New Hampshire in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Chemistry.
THESIS ABSTRACT:
Understanding the properties of bioconjugates and biomaterials has increasingly become the focus of pharmaceutical companies, material scientists, and academia due to their growing list of applications. Bioconjugates have found broad use in therapeutics, drug delivery, tissue engineering, and biosensing. Historically, interest in specific bioconjugates has depended on the cost-availability of the biomacromolecule, making proteins the most well studied, given their relatively low cost and ease of production. However, recent technological advances in plasmid DNA (pDNA) production from E. Coli allow for greater cost-efficiency, changing the landscape ofbiomaterial research. Employing alkylating agents with known chemo-selectivity to nucleophilic sites on DNA, a polymer or polymerization agent can be coupled to biologically derived pDNA. Subsequently, properties of the hybrid-DNA bioconjugate can be controlled via the location of alkylation, to tune degradation rate and stability of the DNA bioconjugate and graft-from polymerization to increase stability and solubility.