Pure and Applied Chemistry, 2005, Volume 77, No. 1, pp. 201-208

Pure Appl. Chem., 2005, Vol. 77, No. 1, pp. 201-208

doi:10.1351/pac200577010201

Indo-U.S. collaborative studies on biocatalytic generation of novel molecular architectures*

Arthur C. Watterson^1,‡, Virinder S. Parmar^1,3, Rajesh Kumar^1,2, Sunil K. Sharma^1,2,3, Najam A. Shakil⁴, Rahul Tyagi^2,3, Ajendra K. Sharma^1,3, Lynne A. Samuelson², Jayant Kumar², Robert Nicolosi¹, and Thomas Shea¹

¹Institute for Nano Science and Engineering Technology, Department of Chemistry, University of Massachusetts, Lowell, MA 01854, USA; ²Center for Advanced Materials, Departments of Chemistry and Physics, University of Massachusetts, Lowell, MA 01854, USA; ³Bioorganic Laboratory, Department of Chemistry, University of Delhi, Delhi 110 007, India; ⁴Division of Agricultural Chemicals, Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi 110 012, India

Abstract: Biocatalytic polymerization reactions on a variety of substrates leading to value-added polymers have been summarized. The main focus of this review is on the control of molecular architecture during enzymatic polymerization reactions. Combined with chemical reactions, several extremely flexible chemo-enzymatic synthetic procedures are described to produce families of new polymeric materials with novel properties. The properties of the synthesized polymers and their applications in various fields, such as drug delivery and flame retardant materials, have also been studied and discussed.

Keywords: amphiphilic polymers; biocatalysis; chemo-enzymatic; drug delivery; flame retardants; lipase; nanospheres; polymerization; siloxanes; terpolymers.