Growing Polymer Vesicles Generated by Polymerization Induced Self-Assembly Coupled With a Living Chemical Reactor

Chemical oscillatory reactions have attracted intensive attention due to their autonomous, continuous, and periodic features. Herein, the radicals generated in Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) oscillator was used to initiate RAFT (reversible addition-fragmentation chain transfer) polymerization of 2-methoxyethyl acrylate (MEA) extending from hydrophilic poly(ethylene glycol) chain transfer agent (PEG-CTA) to give amphiphilic block copolymer, which self-assembled into collective objects with a size ranging from sub-micron to micron. Small-to-giant polymer vesicles could be generated using the above-mentioned BZ-PISA technology, the encapsulation of active BZ recipe into the vesicles also endorses the vesicles with growing features with potential for drug delivery and biomedical applications.

CHEMical KINetics SimuLATOR (Chemkinlator): A friendly user interface for chemical kinetics simulations

CHEMical KINetics SimuLATOR is a Graphical User Interface for the simulation of reaction mechanisms. The interface allows the user to see and change the parameters of a reaction network within a single window. Chemkinlator comes with built-in support for three types of kinetic simulations: Time Series, which computes the concentration of all species in an interval of time in a defined model; Bifurcation diagrams, which are the result of running several Time Series simulations over gradually different kinetic rate constants; and Flow/Temperature time series, which takes into account the effect of flow in the Continuous-flow well-Stirred Tank Reactor, and the effect of temperature on the rates constants according to the Arrhenius equation. In our research group, Chemkinlator has been the primary tool used to test the predictions made by algorithms that analyze homochirality phenomena. Chemkinlator is written in C++14 and Qt, and it uses the Fortran subroutine DLSODE to solve the differential equations associated with the reaction networks. Chemkinlator is open source software under the Apache 2.0 license and can be downloaded freely from https://gitlab.com/homochirality/chemkinlator.