Hydration Water Structure, Hydration Forces, and Mechanical Properties of Polysaccharide Films
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The interaction of polysaccharides with water has a critical impact on their biological function as well as their technological applications. We performed ellipsometry experiments at different relative humidities (RH) to measure the equilibrium swelling of ultrathin films of different polysaccharides: native and modified phytoglycogen (PG) nanoparticles, dextran, and hyaluronic acid. For RH > 70%, the swelling of hydrophilic polymers with increases in RH is described by hydration forces that are characterized by an exponential decay length λ. Our analysis of the high RH swelling regime allowed us to determine λ and the bulk modulus K of the films of different polysaccharides. We also probed the high RH swelling regime using attenuated total reflection infrared (ATR-IR) spectroscopy, which allowed us to determine the degree of hydrogen bonding of the hydration water within the polysaccharide films. Combining the ellipsometry and ATR-IR spectroscopy results, we find that increases in the order of the hydrogen bond network of the hydration water, as specified by the ATR-IR parameter R network, lead to linear increases in K and corresponding inverse changes in λ. These measurements help to elucidate the intimate relationships between the degree of ordering of hydration water, hydration forces, and the mechanical stiffness of polysaccharides. For phytoglycogen, the addition of chemical groups, both cationic and anionic, produced significant increases in its water holding capacity and mechanical properties, suggesting that chemical modification can be used to tune the properties of phytoglycogen for different applications.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".