Nature highlights our collaborative work in JACS

Nature posted a Research Highlight of our collaborative work with Chemistry @ Illinois Prof. Steve Zimmerman and others.

Our work in JACS reports a new class of polymeric materials that rapidly degrade with an acid trigger.

The Ewoldt group contributions involved rheological measurement of degrading mechanical properties and mathematical modeling to infer molecular reaction rates from rheology.

The rapid self-degradation was found to be governed by an autocatalytic reaction, resulting in a governing differential equation known as the “logistic equation” (interestingly, this is also used for some human population growth models).

Miller et al., “Acid-triggered, acid-generating, and self-amplifying degradable polymers,”
Journal of the American Chemical Society (2019).
http://doi.org/10.1021/jacs.8b07705

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