Microfluidic synthesis of monodisperse porous polystyrene microspheres for sorption of bovine serum albumin

Abstract

Droplet microfluidics offers exquisite control over the flows of multiple fluids in micro-scale, enabling fabrication of advanced microspheres with precisely tuneable structures. The main goal of this work was to design monodispersed carboxylated polystyrene microspheres with a developed pore structure (a specific surface area more than 200 m²/g) using microfluidic technology. We investigated the influence of the composition of monomer phase for the stable formation of droplets. Under the stable region, the resulting microspheres (with diameter 50 µm) showed narrow size distribution having a coefficient of variation of below 2%. The obtained microspheres are characterised by morphology and surface structure by means of electron microscopy. The structure of cross-linked microspheres is investigated by solid-state ¹H NMR spectroscopy. Finally, these microspheres have great potential for the effective sorption of biologically active substances (bovine serum albumin).

Keywords:

• Microspheres
• flow-focusing reactor
• bovine serum albumin
• developed pore structure
• porosity

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflict of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of this article.

Additional information

Funding

The study was carried out with the financial support of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research in the framework of scientific project No. 18-03-00206-a.