Electrospun Smart Polysaccharidic Textiles: Enantioselective Membranes and Photo-responsive Actuators

Vortragsinhalt / Abstract

There has recently been a great increase in demand for nonwoven fabrics that are a key component of disposable face masks due to epidemic infectious diseases such as COVID-19. This has focused more and more attention to electrospinning, a well-established method of nanofibrous textile fabrication.

Indeed, electrospun fabrics show superior mechanical resistance when their fiber diameters and alignments are optimized simply by adjusting technical electrospinning parameters. Besides, the high specific surface area of electrospun nanofibrous textiles arising from the nanoscale interstitial spaces between the nanofibers makes them a promising scaffold to filter biological and chemical contaminants.

Currently, raw materials of electrospun fabrics include bio-based polymers and are not limited to fossil-based polymers, and electrospun fabrics made of polysaccharides and their derivatives are one of the most rapidly-growing product markets for various biomedical applications.

In this context, our research team in CERMAV is developing new types of functional polysaccharide-based fabrics via electrospinning, aimed at diverse biomedical applications1 including membrane filters for efficient resolutions of biologically essential chiral molecules [2], as well as photo-actuators for artificial muscles [3].

In this presentation, for the former topic, a new ap-proach for effective chiral resolution via filtration process using electrospun membranes made from polysaccharide derivatives that have been used as packing materials of chiral HPLC columns will be introduced.

For the latter topic, light-driven wettability changes and asymmetric deformations of electrospun self-standing fabrics consisting of a reversible molecular photo-switch, azobenzene, and a natural robust polysaccharide, cellulose, will be presented.

References
[1] Poshina, D.; Otsuka, I., Electrospun Polysaccharidic Textiles for Biomedical Applications. Textiles 2021, 1, 152-169.
[2] Otsuka, I.; Pandey, K.; Ahmadi-Nohadani, H.; Nono-Tagne, S., Electrospun Cellulosic Membranes toward Efficient Chiral Resolutions via Enan-tioselective Permeation. ACS Macro Lett. 2021, 10, 921-925.
[3] Ahmadi-Nohadani, H.; Nono-Tagne, S.; Barrett, C. J.; Otsuka, I., Electrospun Azo-Cellulose Fabric: A Smart Polysaccharidic Photo-actuator. Macromol. Rapid Commun. 2022, 43, 2200063.