PRINCIPAL SCIENTIFIC ACHIEVEMENTS

Dr. Kondo contributed extensively to polymer physical chemistry as well as polysaccharide chemistry through basic and applied research using cellulose as a main subject. He started to synthesize regioselectively substituted cellulose derivatives as cellulose models for understanding hydrogen bonding formation in cellulose homopolymer. Both of the synthesis and the products themselves drew the trigger to attract attention of importance in relationship among distribution of substituent, hydrogen bonds and their physicochemical properties, and at present extensive researches by many research groups are still going on in this area.

His interest was not stayed only at this area and extended to supermolecular architecture of cellulose in native and artificial systems. He started to employ wood cell wall cellulose to investigate beta-glucan association in native systems using physicochemical approaches such as microscopic FT-IR, and in situ atomic force microscopy (AFM). He also developed his own techniques in these analytical tools to fit for polysaccharides polymer.

At the same time, dynamies of beta-glucan molecular association in artificial systems was also investigated to control and develop a supermoleculer structure by focussing on non-crystalline cellulose. Through these researches, he proposed a concept of beta-glucan chain association. Recently, he established a new form of cellulose named Nematic Ordered Cellulose(NOC) which exhibits non crystalline yet ordered states. These findings create a new concept to understand how beta-glucan chains associate and crystallize and also indicate that the NOC may have expanded useful properties for commercial utilization. It should be added that the concept might be extended to the natural process in the degree of glucan chain association which is probably under the control of a multicomponent enzyme complex(TC) for cellulose biosynthesis.

More recently, the above NOC concept was extended to nano-patterned templates including honeycomb patterned cellulose films in order to establish a hierarchical organizing design for 3-D nano/micro architecture of bio-based materials using his original “Bio-Alchemy”. (Please take a look the concept)