Abstract Proposal No.: 9711340 Proposal Type: Investigator Inititated Principal Investigator: Arup K. Chakraborty Affiliation: University of California Berkeley. This grant is awarded through the Separations and Purification Program sub-element of the Interfacial, Transport and Separations Program of the Chemical and Transport Systems Division. The principal investigator is Dr. Arup Chakraborty of the University of California Berkeley. The project is directed towards the understanding of random heteropolymer adsorption on disordered surfaces and the rational design of pattern matching between heterofunctional polymers and adsorption sites. A combination of replica field theory and ensemble groth Monte-Carlo simulations will be developed to examine the issues of statistical pattern matching. Elucidating the phenomenon of statitical pattern matching is expected to impact technologies relevant to biomedical applications such as drug delivery and drug design, Protein separation processes, and polymer adsorptioon and adhesion to surfaces. A goal of the research is the de novo design of random heteropolymer sequence statistics(and hence chemistry) that will optimally inhibit the attachment of specific viruses to cells, and to guide the design of inexpensive chromatographic materials that can discriminate between different types of protein sequences.
