[Polym. Chem.] How does a tiny terminal alkynyl end group drive fully hydrophilic homopolymers to self-assemble into multicompartment vesicles and flower-like complex particles?
writer：Tingting Liu, Wei Tian,* Yunqing Zhu, Yang Bai, Hongxia Yan and Jianzhong Du*
keywords：Homopolymers，self-assemble，terminal alkynyl
source：期刊
specific source：Polym. Chem., 2014, 5, 5077–5088
Issue time：2014年
It is a theoretical and technical challenge to construct well-defined nanostructures such as vesicles from fully hydrophilic homopolymers in pure water. In this paper, we incorporate one terminal alkynyl group into a fully hydrophilic linear or non-linear homopolymer to drive its unusual self-assembly in aqueous solution to form multicompartment vesicles, spherical compound micelles, flower-like complex particles, etc., which have been confirmed by transmission electron microscopy (TEM), atomic force microscopy (AFM), dynamic/static light scattering (DLS/SLS) and drug encapsulation experiments. Particularly, a long chain hyperbranched structure with lots of terminal alkynyl groups induces the formation of vesicles. Also, the encapsulation experiment of doxorubicin hydrochloride was employed to further distinguish vesicular and micellar nanostructures. Additionally, the terminal alkynyl group-driven self-assembly has been applied to hydrophilic POEGMA475 homopolymers to afford similar nanostructures to PNIPAM homopolymers such as multicompartment vesicles and spherical compound micelles. Our study has opened up a new way to prepare hydrophilic homopolymer self-assemblies with tunable morphology.
全文链接：http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2014/py/c4py00501e#!divAbstract