Polymer brushes

Helical Polymer-Containing Bottlebrush Polymers (BBPs): Design, Synthesis, and Perspectives

Helical polymer-containing bottlebrush polymers (BBPs) are a special and fascinating type of polymer. They possess bottlebrush topology and contain helical polymers as main chains (MCs) or side chains (SCs), thereby presenting interesting and fantastic properties, such as chiral amplification, circularly polarized luminescence, photonic crystal, and so on. This review mainly focuses on BBPs containing helical polymers of polypeptides, polyacetylenes (PAs), and polyisocyanides (PIs). Detailed summarizations are severally given to BBPs with helical polypeptides as MCs and SCs. Meanwhile, BBPs comprising helical PAs as MCs are fully discussed. What's more, BBPs consisted of helical PIs as MCs and SCs are described separately. In addition, BBPs with other helical polymers are briefly introduced, too. The authors hope this review will motivate more interest in developing helical polymers with complex topologies and fascinating properties, and encourage further progress in functional chiral materials.

Design of biointerfaces composed of soft materials using controlled radical polymerizations

Soft interface materials have an immense potential for the improvement of biointerfaces, which are the interface of biological and artificially designed materials. Controlling the chemical and physical structures of the interfaces at the nanometer level plays an important role in understanding the mechanism of the functioning and its applications. Controlled radical polymerization (CRP) techniques, including atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP) and reversible addition-fragmentation chain-transfer (RAFT) polymerization, have been developed in the field of precision polymer chemistry. It allows the formation of well-defined surfaces such as densely packed polymer brushes and self-assembled nanostructures of block copolymers. More recently, a novel technique to prepare polymers containing biomolecules, called biohybrids, has also been developed, which is a consequence of the advancement of CRP so as to proceed in an aqueous media with oxygen. This review article summarizes recent advances in CRP for the design of biointerfaces.

Mass production of polymer nano-wires filled with metal nano-particles

Despite the ongoing progress in nanotechnology and its applications, the development of strategies for connecting nano-scale systems to micro- or macroscale elements is hampered by the lack of structural components that have both, nano- and macroscale dimensions. The production of nano-scale wires with macroscale length is one of the most interesting challenges here. There are a lot of strategies to fabricate long nanoscopic stripes made of metals, polymers or ceramics but none is suitable for mass production of ordered and dense arrangements of wires at large numbers. In this paper, we report on a technique for producing arrays of ordered, flexible and free-standing polymer nano-wires filled with different types of nano-particles. The process utilizes the strong response of photosensitive polymer brushes to irradiation with UV-interference patterns, resulting in a substantial mass redistribution of the polymer material along with local rupturing of polymer chains. The chains can wind up in wires of nano-scale thickness and a length of up to several centimeters. When dispersing nano-particles within the film, the final arrangement is similar to a core-shell geometry with mainly nano-particles found in the core region and the polymer forming a dielectric jacket.