Abstract
Polysaccharide coated nanoparticles represent a promising class of environmentally friendly latex to replace those stabilized by small toxic molecular surfactants. We report here an in situ formulation of free-surfactant core/shell nanoparticles latex consisting of dextran-based diblock amphiphilic copolymers. The synthesis of copolymers and the immediate latex formulation were performed directly in water using a photo-initiated reversible addition fragmentation chain transfer-mediated polymerization induced self-assembly strategy. A hydrophilic macromolecular chain transfer-bearing photosensitive thiocarbonylthio group (eDexCTA) was first prepared by a modification of the reducing chain end of dextran in two steps: (i) reductive amination by ethylenediamine in the presence of sodium cyanoborohydride, (ii) then introduction of CTA by amidation reaction. Latex nanoparticles were then formulated in situ by chain-extending eDexCTA using 2-hydroxypropyl methacrylate (HPMA) under 365 nm irradiation, leading to amphiphilic dextran-b-poly(2-hydroxypropyl methacrylate) diblock copolymers (DHX). Solid concentration (SC) and the average degree of polymerization -- of PHPMA block (X) were varied to investigate their impact on the size and the morphology of latex nanoparticles termed here SCDHX. Light scattering and transmission electron microscopy analysis revealed that SCDHX form exclusively spherical nano-objects. However, the size of nano-objects, ranging from 20 nm to 240 nm, increases according to PHPMA block length.
Highlights
For many decades, latex, consisting of aqueous colloidal polymer-based nanoparticles, has been intensively used in various fields including coatings, textiles, paints, papers, beauty products and nanocarriers for drug delivery [1,2]
Latex nanoparticles are typically prepared in a heterogeneous medium by emulsion polymerization of a water-insoluble monomer stabilized by surfactants of low molecular weight
As we demonstrated in our recent mini-review [33], the ‘onepot synthesis and self-assembly’ concept of polymerization induced self-assembly (PISA) technology is interesting for polysaccharides-containing amphiphilic copolymers to overcome the limitation of their selfassembly using the multi-steps solvent-switch methods [33]
Summary
Latex, consisting of aqueous colloidal polymer-based nanoparticles, has been intensively used in various fields including coatings, textiles, paints, papers, beauty products and nanocarriers for drug delivery [1,2]. An environmentally friendly process has been developed to produce stable nanoparticles of a covalently linked corona to core at a high solid concentration (up to 40% wt) [23,24,25] Such technology, known as aqueous polymerization induced self-assembly (PISA) [26,27,28,29,30,31,32], involves a chain-extension of a hydrophilic macromolecular stabilizer using a monomer that forms a hydrophobic block when reaching a critical chain-length. The size of the nano-objects varies depending on the experimental conditions studied
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