Data from: Flow imaging microscopy as a novel tool for high-throughput evaluation of elastin-like polymer coacervates

Biological and bioinspired polymer microparticles have broad biomedical
and industrial applications, including drug delivery, tissue engineering,
surface modification, environmental remediation, imaging, and sensing.
Full realization of the potential of biopolymer microparticles will
require methods for rigorous characterization of particle sizes,
morphologies, and dynamics, so that researchers may correlate particle
characteristics with synthesis methods and desired functions. Toward this
end, we evaluated biopolymer microparticles using flow imaging microscopy.
This technology is widely used in the biopharmaceutical industry but is
not yet well-known among the materials community. Our polymer, a
genetically engineered elastin-like polypeptide (ELP), self-assembles into
micron-scale coacervates. We performed flow imaging of ELP coacervates
using two different instruments, one with a lower size limit of
approximately 2 microns, the other with a lower size limit of
approximately 300 nanometers. We validated flow imaging results by
comparison with dynamic light scattering and atomic force microscopy
analyses. We explored the effects of various solvent conditions on ELP
coacervate size, morphology, and behavior, such as the dispersion of
single particles versus aggregates. We found that flow imaging is a
superior tool for rapid and thorough particle analysis of ELP coacervates
in solution. We anticipate that researchers studying many types of
microscale protein or polymer assemblies will be interested in flow
imaging as a tool for quantitative, solution-based characterization.