Prospects for electrophoretic characterization of synthetic polymers

摘要

Although electrophoretic methods are universally accepted tools for the characterization of biopolymers, these methods have found little use in the study of synthetic polymers. This lack of acceptance has a reasonable basis - most synthetic polymersdo not bear charge of dissolvein high dielectric solvents such as water. Neverthless, many synthetic polymers do exhibit these features, and if so, the characterization methods familiar to the synthetic polymer community encounter much difficulty. Studyof synthetic polymers by electrophoresis may thus have considerable practical importance. Several specific characterization challenges will be discussed: cationic polyelectrolytes, high molecular weigt polyelectrolytes (M>10~6 g/mol), charged oligomers,ad polymers of variable density. In each case, we believe electrophoresis may be a characterization method of choice for synthetic polymers. A clear downside to these studies is the tedious experimental optimization/tuning needed for each polymer class.Fortunately, we can gain much by studying how biopolymer characterizations are performed on analogous materials. In addition to charged polymers, we believe some neutral synthetic polymers may be open to characterization by electrophoresis. One case will be discussed, the separation of poly (ethylene oxide) by gel electrophoresis in the presence of charged surfactant.