Polymer and Biopolymer Brushes: For Materials Science and Biotechnology

Polymers at interfaces is a field which has fascinated physicists and chemists now for nearly half a century, with respect to both basic and applied research. Polymer brushes refer to polymeric assemblies tethered at one end to a solid substrate either through covalent attachment or physical adsorption. At sufficiently high grafting density, due to repulsive interactions, the tethered chains stretch away fromthe surface into the solvent creating polymer brush structure. The conceptual origins of polymer brushes can be traced back to the 1950s, when it was discovered that flocculation could be prevented by grafting polymer chains onto colloidal particles. Over the past decades, developments in this field led to its valuation as a premier technique for chemical modification of solid substrates-polymer brushes offer a macromolecular perspective on the modification of interfacial properties of materials.