Significance of Plastic Recycling with the Focus on Polyesters - Creating a Circular Economy.

Plastics materials are essential in every part of our lives, resulting in their increasing production and consumption. Consequently, recycling of plastics has been of great importance in the last decades. Among all types of plastics, polyesters have become very appealing for numerous kinds of applications, making their recycling crucial.

Multivalent Pattern Recognition through Control of Nano-Spacing in Low-Valency Super-Selective Materials.

Super-selective multivalent ligand-receptor interactions display a signature step-like onset in binding when meeting a characteristic density of target receptors. Materials engineered for super-selective binding generally display a high number of flexible ligands to enhance the systems' avidity. In many biological processes, however, ligands are present in moderate copy numbers and arranged in spatio-temporal patterns.

Engineering a stable future for DNA-origami as a biomaterial.

DNA as a biomaterial has evoked great interest as a potential platform for therapeutics and diagnostics and as hydrogel scaffolds due to the relative ease of programming its robust and uniform shape, site-specific functionality and controlled responsive behavior. However, for a stable self-assembled product, a relatively high cation concentration is required to prevent denaturation. Physiological and cell-culture conditions do not match these concentrations and present additional nucleases that cause a serious threat to the integrity of DNA-based materials.