FOR MORE INFORMATION:
charmon1@cord.edu
CONCORDIA LECTURE EXPLORES USE OF BIOPLASTICS IN PHARMACEUTICALS
Dr. Graeme Wyllie, assistant professor of chemistry at Concordia, and student co-researchers Hannah Olson ’24 and Joshua Weber ’23 will present a Centennial Scholars Lecture at 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 17, in Morrie Jones Conference Center A-B, Knutson Campus Center. The lecture, “Colors and Dyes and Pharmaceuticals, Oh My: Release and uptake from a series of Chitosan-Alginate Bioplastics,” is free and open to the public.
With public awareness on environmental problems, alternatives to traditional petroleum plastics have been sought. Bioplastics are a class of new materials which use natural ingredients. A specific class of these can be made from chitosan (a derivative of a material in shrimp and lobster shells) and alginate (a seaweed extract). These chitosan-alginate bioplastics have been the focus of the second-semester general chemistry lab at Concordia for the past five years. As part of experiments, first-year students study bioplastics as potential drug delivery systems which would release materials trapped inside and model this pharmaceutical release using commercial food dyes.
Recent data from the teaching lab suggested that the release of material was more complex than previously thought. So in the summer of 2021, the Wyllie research lab has systematically investigated not only the release of a range of materials such as food dyes, pigments and pharmaceuticals implanted in bioplastics at the time of synthesis but also looked at the opposite process, that is uptake of these materials from solution by fresh bioplastics.
Wyllie and the co-researchers will share what they have learned and discuss future directions the project will take.
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