Functional Polymers from Snail Slime and Radical Ring-Opening Polymerisation

Dr. Jens Gaitzsch (Leibniz Institute for Polymer Research Dresden)

18. November 2025, 17:15

Johannes Kepler Universität Linz - Raum: HS 11

Altenberger Straße 69, 4040 Linz

ABSTRACT:

In order to enable the use of polymers amidst increasing environmental concerns, they need to be placed on an environmentally friendly platform. This means to source them in an ecological way but also to ensure that the final polymers are biodegradable, where they need to be.

One way to ensure this, is to utilise previously untapped carbon sources and snail slime is one of them. Whilst known to many, the chemical potential of this material remained untapped. We have now shown its potential in hydrogel-based microfluidics as the slime can reduce and stabilise gold-nanoparticles and can also be the main material for synthesising hydrogel dots. Once in the chip, the dots can effectively reduce chemicals like the dye molecules. 

On the material side, Polyesters are gaining increasing attention as biodegradable polymers that play a key role in solving increasingly pressing environmental challenges. Radical ring-opening polymerisation (RROP) of cyclic ketene acetals (CKAs) represents a synthetic strategy to produce fully biodegradable and functional polyesters with a wide range of accessible properties such as semi-crystallinity, hydrophilicity and pH sensitivity. With the introduction of pH-sensitive polyesters from RROP, the unravelling of the branching reaction and the ability to control macroscopic properties by polymer structure, RROP of CKAs has taken giant step forward. Together with the amine-bearing CKAs to reach pH sensitive polyesters, RROP has become a versatile tool that can produce a large variety of biodegradable polyesters.