To celebrate the growth and development of the RSC Applied Polymers community and to highlight the remarkable authors who continue to contribute their high quality work to the journal we would like to share the opinions and insights of these authors through this introductory blog post. Once dubbed #RSCAppliedfirst50, our blog posts aim to give a voice to the authors behind the research and hope that their insights might shed light upon growing challenges and progress in polymer science and its applications.
In this edition, we hear from Professor Matthew Gibson as they discuss their work entitled ‘Acidic Polymers Reversibly Deactivate Phages due to pH Changes.’
Insight into ‘Acidic Polymers Reversibly Deactivate Phages due to pH Changes’ by Professor Matthew Gibson
Our recent paper in RSC Applied Polymers was our latest as part of our collaboration with Dr Antonio Sagona (Warwick University) and also Dr Peter Kilbride at Cytiva. In this work we explored how synthetic polymers can deactivate Phage (bacteria specific viruses) to stop them infecting bacteria. This was actually a side project emerging from a chance observation:
My team is very interested in new polymer tools to help us cryopreserve important biologics such as cells and proteins. We had started a project to ask how we can cryopreserve bacteriophage, which has not really been widely studied. For any biologic to be ‘useful’ you need to be able to bank it, ship it, and use it, so we wanted to improve this. However, during the work, a PhD student in the team, Dr Huba Marton saw that acidic polymers were not good for cryopreserving Phage, but most other polymers were. After some investigation we noticed that the acidic polymers did cryopreserve the phage, but they also stopped them infecting bacteria (and hence we thought at first they were not cryopreserved).
This recent paper was trying to determine if the acid polymers were ‘special’ or if simply lowering the pH led to the phage inhibition. To cut a long story short, the pH was really crucial, but when we use the polymers, the inhibition is fully reversible but it is not reversible when we lower to the pH with e.g. HCl. This work is important as phage infection is a huge issue in bioprocessing and in research labs: a phage infection can stop all research for weeks, or longer. Having simple tools to prevent their infection (and hence stop propagation) could be very useful. We hope to explore polymer-phage interactions more in the future to see how we can deploy these in biotechnology.
Where do you see your own research going in future?
As part of my teams relocation to Manchester we have become very interested in applying our skills to sustainability. In polymer science most people instantly think of ‘plastics in the environment’ and ‘degradable polymers’ when you say this, but we are thinking beyond this. In particular where clever polymer science can impact in biotechnology.
For example, with my spin-out company Cryologyx Ltd we are exploring how our cryopreservative polymers can bank cell cultures ‘ready to use’. So, a user can just thaw them and use a lot less single use plastic, as they cut out 7 days of work which is plastic-intensive. So, by using a bit more polymer early on (to protect the cells), we can reduce a lot the downstream usage. Similarly if we can develop tools to prevent phage infections you have less down time in bioprocessing and hence make both chemical and energy savings. There is lots of scope at this interface with biotechnology where modern polymer chemistry can make an impact, and I am lucky to be based in the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, surround by UK leaders in this area.
We are also using some of our technologies to make shelf-stable rapid diagnostics and therapeutics, with the aim of making these more accessible around the world. We recently published, with Prof Dave Adams at Glasgow, showing a gel to store proteins at room temperature, which we feel is a really big discovery.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07580-0
In which upcoming conferences or events may our readers meet you?
I was honoured by the RSC with the Corday-Morgan Medal earlier this year, so I will be on a lecture tour of several UK universities in the New Year and also at the RSC’s Materials Chemistry 17 Conference in Edinburgh in July. I will also be speaking at the Polymers Gorden Conference next summer in the US.
How do you spend your spare time?
I relocated my laboratory from Warwick to Manchester last year and we recently moved house, so that takes all my spare time right now! Normally it would be getting into the great outdoors as often as possible, normally with our dog.
Professor Matthew I. Gibson
Professor Matthew I. Gibson
Matt holds a Chair in Sustainable Biomaterials at the University of Manchester, UK. His multidisciplinary research group focusses on developing new materials to address challenges in Biotechnology and Healthcare with a particular focus on cryobiology. Matt was a Royal Society Industry Fellow with Cytiva (2019-2023) and has held ERC starter and Consolidator Grants, and is co-founder of the biotech spin-out Cryologyx Ltd. Matt has been awarded several prizes including the McBain, Dextra and MacroGroup Young Researcher’s medals as well prizes from the American Chemical Society, and an RSC Horizon Prize for ‘Team Ice’.
https://gibsongroupresearch.com
Acidic polymers reversibly deactivate phages due to pH changes
Huba L. Marton, Antonia P. Sagona,Peter Kilbrided and Matthew I. Gibson
RSC Appl. Polym., 2024, Advance Article. DOI: 10.1039/D4LP00202D
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RSC Applied Polymers is a leading international journal for the application of polymers, including experimental and computational studies on both natural and synthetic systems. In this journal, you can discover cross-disciplinary scientific research that leverages polymeric materials in a range of applications. This includes high impact advances made possible with polymers across materials, biology, energy applications and beyond.
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