Bypassing Osmotic Shock Dilemma in a Polystyrene Resin Using the Green Solvent Cyclopentyl methyl Ether (CPME): A Morphological Perspective

The “osmotic shock” phenomenon is the main thing that is responsible for morphological structure alteration, which can jeopardize the use of a polymer in a chemical process. This is extremely important in solid-phase peptide synthesis (SPPS), which is the method of choice for the preparation of these important biologically active compounds. Herein, we have used Hildebrand solubility parameters (δ) to investigate the influence of different ethers that are used in the precipitation step of the SPPS using a polystyrene resin. The green cyclopentyl methyl ether (CPME) has shown to be slightly superior to 2-methyltetrahydrofurane, which is also a green ether and clearly better than the hazardous diethyl ether and tert-butyl methyl ether. These results have been corroborated by scanning electron microscope (SEM) analysis and computational studies. All together, these confirm the adequacy of CPME for being the ether of choice to be used in SPPS.