Modern trends in polymer bioconjugates design

This review describes recent changes and progress in the field of polymer bioconjugation (i.e. covalent attachment of synthetic polymers to biological entities such as nucleic acids, oligopeptides, proteins, enzymes, carbohydrates, viruses or cells). This important field of research has evolved radically during the last decade. Polymer bioconjugates have been initially developed by biochemists and have been for many years studied practically exclusively for bio-medical applications. However, within the last few years, these novel class of macromolecules have been shown to be useful in many other emerging areas of materials science. Therefore, the synthesis of polymer bioconjugates became rather suddenly a central topic in polymer chemistry. For instance, modern synthetic methods such as controlled radical polymerization, ring opening metathesis polymerization or "click" chemistry have been recently proven to be extremely versatile tools for preparing tailor-made polymer bioconjugates. These novel synthetic trends are discussed in details in the present manuscript. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.