This article presents the preparation of matrices from two new families of fumaric copolymers and the effect of structural differences on their physicochemical and biological behavior. Diisopropyl fumarate (DIPF) and poly(ethylene glycol) methyl ether methacrylate (OEGMA) or N-isopropylacrylamide (NIPAM) were copolymerized by conventional radical and RAFT polymerization to obtain lineal or start architectures, respectively. These copolymers were characterized by spectroscopic (FTIR and 1 H-NMR) and chromatographic methods. The thermal stability was studied by thermal gravimetric analysis, showing some differences in relation to the architecture and chemical nature of copolymers. SEM morphological analysis demonstrated that the surface of the matrices derived from OEGMA exhibited an irregular and rough surface, while DIPF-NIPAM copolymers presented smooth surface with nearly no significant porosity. The matrix obtained of both kinds of copolymers presented no cytotoxicity as it was evaluated using a model of macrophages on culture. Moreover, cell growth was better on the surfaces of the DIPF-NIPAM matrices, suggesting a good interaction with this matrix and its potential application as matrices for tissue engineering.

We designed an allele-specific amplification protocol to optimize Y-chromosome SNP typing, which is an unavoidable step for defining the phylogenetic status of paternal lineages. It allows the simultaneous highly specific definition of up to six mutations in a single reaction by amplification fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) without the need of specialized equipment, at a considerably lower cost than that based on single-base primer extension (SNaPshot™) technology or PCR-RFLP systems, requiring as little as 0.5 ng DNA and compatible with the small fragments characteristic of low-quality DNA. By designation of two primers recognizing the derived and ancestral state for each SNP, which can be differentiated by size by the addition of a noncomplementary nucleotide tail, we could define major Y clades E, F, K, R, Q, and subhaplogroups R1, R1a, R1b, R1b1b, R1b1c, J1, J2, G1, G2, I1, Q1a3, and Q1a3a1 through amplification fragments that ranged between 60 and 158bp.