CONTRACTION AND RE-EXPANSION OF SINGLE POLYSTYRENESULFONATE CHAIN: THE EFFECT OF COUNTERIONS
The mysteries of polyelectrolytes have been attracting considerable research attention for decades. One major driving force is to understand the conformation change of biomacromolecules, such as protein folding and unfolding, DNA condensation.13The mystery arises from the long-ranged electrostatic interaction and the nature of multiple charges. One of the interesting phenomenon was found in early studies: researchers discovered that highly charged polyelectrolytes exhibit phase transition upon addition of multivalent salt.4 Precipitation occurred firstly when salt concentration reached a critical value. When salt concentration rises beyond a second critical value, the precipitation will redissolve. Many theoretical studies have been conducted in order to understand this phenomenon from the view point of single chain conformation.5,6 However, as far as we know, there has been no experimental report on the single chain conformation during such a process. In this work, we adopted a single fluorescence technique, fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS), to study the conformation change of a strong polyelectrolyte, polystyrenesulfonate (PSS Na+) as a function of the salt addition in its aqueous solution.
Pengxiang Jia Jiang Zhao
Joint laboratory of Polymer Science and Materials,State Key Laboratory of Polymer Physics and Chemistry,Institute of Chemistry,Chinese Academy of Sciences,Beijing,100190,China
国际会议
International Symposium on Polymer Physics(2008年国际高分子物理学术会议PP2008)
厦门
英文
217-218
2008-06-08（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）