TY  - JOUR
A1  - Feoktistova, Natalia
A1  - Rose, Jürgen
A1  - Prokopovic, Vladimir Z.
A1  - Vikulina, Anna S.
A1  - Skirtach, Andre
A1  - Volodkin, Dmitry
T1  - Controlling the Vaterite CaCO3 Crystal Pores. Design of Tailor-Made Polymer Based Microcapsules by Hard Templating
JF  - Langmuir
N2  - The spherical vaterite CaCO3 microcrystals are nowadays widely used as sacrificial templates for fabrication of various microcarriers made of biopolymers (e.g., proteins, nucleic acids, enzymes) due to porous structure and mild template elimination conditions. Here, we demonstrated for the first time that polymer microcarriers with tuned internal nanoarchitecture can be designed by employing the CaCO3 crystals of controlled porosity. The layer-by-layer deposition has been utilized to assemble shell-like (hollow) and matrix-like (filled) polymer capsules due to restricted and free polymer diffusion through the crystal pores, respectively. The crystal pore size in the range of few tens of nanometers can be adjusted without any additives by variation of the crystal preparation temperature in the range 745 degrees C. The temperature-mediated growth mechanism is explained by the Ostwald ripening of nanocrystallites forming the crystal secondary structure. Various techniques including SEM, AFM, CLSM, Raman microscopy, nitrogen adsorptiondesorption, and XRD have been employed for crystal and microcapsule analysis. A three-dimensional model is introduced to describe the crystal internal structure and predict the pore cutoff and available surface for the pore diffusing molecules. Inherent biocompatibility of CaCO3 and a possibility to scale the porosity in the size range of typical biomacromolecules make the CaCO3 crystals extremely attractive tools for template assisted designing tailor-made biopolymer-based architectures in 2D to 3D targeted at drug delivery and other bioapplications.
Y1  - 2016
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.langmuir.6b00717
SN  - 0743-7463
VL  - 32
SP  - 4229
EP  - 4238
PB  - American Chemical Society
CY  - Washington
ER  -