Lili Zhen
University of Roma Tor Vergata, Italy
Title: A holistic approach to tannins chemical functionalization towards tailored surface adsorpiton properties
Biography
Biography: Lili Zhen
Abstract
Tannins are a major source of polyphenolic components after lignin, with 160 000 tons potentially biosynthesized each year. Due to their excellent protein complexing abilitity,tannins have different metabolic and biological roles, such as cell wall construction, against worms, fungi, bacterials and UV protection, that made tannins perfect natrual biofilm control agents in human daliylife life. Tannins posess multiple structure units featured on aromatic oligmer or macromolecular with free phenolic groups and usually classified into hydrolysable tannins that consist of esters of gallic acid with a core sugar, and condensed tannins that are oligomers or polymers of flavan-3-ol units.
The aim of our work has focused on the tayloring of hydrophobic/hydrophilic properties of different tannins. A general chemical process for specific tannin functionalization has been developed and a library of specifically functionalized tannins carrying additional functional groups in specific loading factors has been created. More specifically ammonium groups, carboxylic groups and PEG have been succesfully linked to an array of five different tannins possessing different chemical structures.The products were fully characterized by quatitative 31P NMR, 1H NMR, HSQC, MALDI.