Abstract
Glycopolymers are polymers with sugar moieties which display biodegradable and/or biocompatible character. They have emerged as an environmentally-friendly solution to classical synthetic polymers and have attracted significant research interest in the past years. Herein, we present the synthesis of a D-mannose based glycopolymer with biodegradable features. The glycopolymer was synthesized by radical copolymerization between a D-mannose oligomer bearing polymerizable double bonds and 2-hydroxypropyl acrylate, in a weight ratio of 1:2. The copolymerization kinetics was investigated by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and the activation energy of the process was comparatively assessed by Kissinger–Akahira–Sunose and Flynn–Wall–Ozawa methods. The obtained glycopolymer displayed good thermal behavior, fact proven by thermogravimetrical (TG) analysis and it was submitted to biodegradation inside a bioreactor fed with water from the Bega River as the source of microbial inoculum. The glycopolymer sample degraded by approximately 60% in just 23 days. The biodegradation pattern of the glycopolymer was successfully fitted against a modified sigmoidal exponential function. The kinetic model coefficients and its accuracy were calculated using Matlab and the correlation coefficient is more than promising. The changes inside glycopolymer structure after biodegradation were studied using TG and FTIR analyses, which revealed that the sugar moiety is firstly attacked by the microbial consortia as nutrient source for proliferation.
Highlights
Our research group has been involved in the modification of the sugar skeleton for obtaining competitive polymeric materials with biodegradable features. We have focused both on monosaccharides [27,28,29,30,31,32] and on polysaccharides [33,34,35] and managed to obtain and characterize new glycopolymers for common applications and biomedicine
The plastic materials industry is based on large market of diverse objects, most of them of single use, which cannot be degraded and which persisted in the environment for large periods
The glycopolymers we have synthesized prior have proved as good alternatives for common plastics, due to their good thermal behavior and plasticity but they have displayed biodegradability when tested in vitro, using pure cultures [30,36], or natural occurring bacteria consortia [37]
Summary
D-mannose based oligomer (M) was isolated in our laboratory previously [17]. 2-hydroxypropyl acrylate (HPA) and benzoyl peroxide (BOP) were purchased from Merck (Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany) and used without purification.
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