Covalent Attachment and Detachment by Reactive DESI of Sequence-Coded Polymer Taggants.

The use of sequence-defined polymers is an interesting emerging solution for materials identification and traceability. Indeed, a very large amount of identification sequences can be created using a limited alphabet of coded monomers. However, in all reported studies, sequence-defined taggants are usually included in a host material by noncovalent adsorption or entrapment, which may lead to leakage, aggregation, or degradation. To avoid these problems, sequence-defined polymers are covalently attached in the present work to the mesh of model materials, namely acrylamide hydrogels. To do so, sequence-coded polyurethanes containing a disulfide linker and a terminal methacrylamide moiety are synthesized by stepwise solid-phase synthesis. These methacrylamide macromonomers are afterward copolymerized with acrylamide and bisacrylamide in order to achieve cross-linked hydrogels containing covalently-bound polyurethane taggants. It is shown herein that these taggants can be selectively detached from the hydrogel mesh by reactive desorption electrospray ionization. Using dithiothreitol the disulfide linker that links the taggant to the gel can be selectively cleaved. Ultimately, the released taggants can be decoded by tandem mass spectrometry.

Abiotic Sequence-Coded Oligomers as Efficient In†Vivo Taggants for the Identification of Implanted Materials.

Sequence-defined oligourethanes were tested as in vivo taggants for implant identification. The oligomers were prepared in an orthogonal solid-phase iterative approach and thus contained a coded monomer sequence that can be unequivocally identified by tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS). The oligomers were then included in small amounts (1 wt %) in square-centimeter-sized crosslinked poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) model films, which were intramuscularly and subcutaneously implanted in the abdomen of rats. After one week, one month, or three months of implantation, the PVA films were explanted. The rat tissues exposed to the implants did not exhibit any adverse reactions, which suggested that the taggants are not harmful and probably not leaching out from the films. Furthermore, the explanted films were immersed in methanol, as a solvent for oligourethanes, and the liquid extract was analyzed by mass spectrometry. In all cases, the oligourethane taggant was detected, and its sequence was identified by MS/MS.

2D Sequence-Coded Oligourethane Barcodes for Plastic Materials Labeling.

Mixtures of uniform sequence-defined oligourethanes are evaluated as 2D molecular barcodes for labeling three different commodity polymers, namely polystyrene, polyvinylchloride and polyethylene terephthalate. Six different oligourethanes are synthesized by solid-phase iterative synthesis and are coded using a binary monomer alphabet. High-resolution mass spectrometry studies indicate that all oligomers are uniform and sequence-defined. However, instead of using them as individual coded chains, oligomers with different chain-length, mass and sequence are mixed into intentionally polydispersed libraries. In particular, a three-component library and a four-component library are created to encode a 2-bytes model binary sequence. These 2D-coded libraries are incorporated in all commodity plastics via a simple solvent casting procedure. Furthermore, in all cases, the oligomer mixtures can be extracted from the host polymer films and deciphered by mass spectrometry, thus opening interesting avenues for anti-counterfeiting and traceability applications.

Coding in 2D: Using Intentional Dispersity to Enhance the Information Capacity of Sequence-Coded Polymer Barcodes.

A 2D approach was studied for the design of polymer-based molecular barcodes. Uniform oligo(alkoxyamine amide)s, containing a monomer-coded binary message, were synthesized by orthogonal solid-phase chemistry. Sets of oligomers with different chain-lengths were prepared. The physical mixture of these uniform oligomers leads to an intentional dispersity (1st dimension fingerprint), which is measured by electrospray mass spectrometry. Furthermore, the monomer sequence of each component of the mass distribution can be analyzed by tandem mass spectrometry (2nd dimension sequencing). By summing the sequence information of all components, a binary message can be read. A 4-bytes extended ASCII-coded message was written on a set of six uniform oligomers. Alternatively, a 3-bytes sequence was written on a set of five oligomers. In both cases, the coded binary information was recovered.