Method grows polymers without damaging cells

Abstract

Modifying the surface of cells with synthetic polymers offers a strategy for manipulating cellular behavior. Usually researchers make such modifications by attaching premade polymers to functional groups on the cell surface, but that “grafting-to” approach isn’t very efficient. An alternative approach involves “grafting from,” in which a polymer grows from an initiator on the cell surface. But this has been hard to do in ways that keep the cells—especially mammalian cells—alive. H. Tom Soh of Stanford University; Jia Niu and Craig J. Hawker of the University of California, Santa Barbara; and coworkers report an approach using a light-mediated controlled radical polymerization method that is gentle enough to use with mammalian cells (Nat. Chem. 2017, DOI: 10.1038/nchem.2713). The researchers used cell-surface-anchoring derivatives of 2-(butylthiocarbonothioyl)propionic acid as the chain-transfer agents that are attached to the cells and initiate the reaction. The polymer chain (shown) grows through the add...