Microrheological study hyaluronan solutions after exposure to low temperatures

The aim of this bachelor thesis is to study the influence of a repeated freezing and thawing process to hyaluronan solutions. The thesis is meant to determine if repeatedly exposing hyaluronan solutions to low temperatures may change the arrangement of the polymer chains and develop weak interactions between these chains. In the thesis the applicability of the two microrheological methods was verified and these were single particle microrheology and dynamic light scattering. For microrheological measurements we used polystyrene particles with a diameter of 0,5 m. There was an effort to determine changes in the structure of hyaluronan solutions by changing the dependence of mean square displacement of particles on time and by changing viscosity of the hyaluronan solutions. Infrared spectroscopy was used as the accompanying method but it proved to be unsuitable for this purpose