UNAM Research Featured on Cover of ChemComm
MSN Ph.D. student Aslı Çelebioğlu and Principle Investigator Res. Asst. Prof. Dr. Tamer Uyar have published the scientific report "Cyclodextrin Nanofiber by Electrospinning" in Chemical Communications (ChemComm). Their work was editorially selected for the cover of Issue 37 of ChemComm, to be published October 7, 2010. ChemComm is a leading weekly journal published by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC).
Electrospinning is very cost-effective and versatile technique for producing functional nanofibers. In electrospinning, a continuous filament is spun from a polymer solution under the influence of a very high electrical field, resulting in nanofibers. In principal, electrospinning involves high molecular weight polymers and high polymer concentrations since chain entanglements and overlapping are necessary for uniform fiber formation; therefore, small molecules cannot be electrospun into nanofibers.
However, Çelebioğlu and Dr. Uyar have demonstrated for the first time that a non-polymer, such as cyclodextrins (CD), can be electrospun into nanofibers by itself. These findings offer the potential of fabricating new functional nanofibers from cyclodextrins (or other supramolecular systems) via the electrospinning technique. The research published this month has applications for pharmacy, biotechnology, nanotextiles, and the food industry.