Abstract
Herein, we report the preparation of nucleobase-containing synthetic amphiphilic diblock copolymers using RAFT polymerization.
Highlights
Nucleobase-containing synthetic polymers inspired by Nature have been widely exploited to mediate polymer tacticity,[26] to control polymer composition or sequence[27,28] and to template polymerizations.[29,30,31] All these studies have been inspired by the sequence specificity and selective recognition of nucleobase functionalities which can be exploited to create DNA materials[32,33,34] and perform DNA template chemistry.[35,36,37]Nucleobase interactions have been utilized to drive self-assembly[38,39,40,41,42,43] and for achieving a biomimetic segregation/ templating approach to polymer synthesis.[44]
The characterization data for the polymers are summarized in Table 1. 1H NMR spectroscopy was used to calculate the degree of polymerization (DP) by comparing the integrated signals corresponding to characteristic signals from the nucleobases (δ = 11.23 ppm) with those assigned to the end group of the CTA (δ = 0.84 ppm) (Fig. S4†)
Monodisperse spherical micelles were formed through direct dissolution or solvent switch methods and characterized by dynamic light scattering (DLS) and TEM
Summary
Nucleobase-containing synthetic polymers inspired by Nature have been widely exploited to mediate polymer tacticity,[26] to control polymer composition or sequence[27,28] and to template polymerizations.[29,30,31] All these studies have been inspired by the sequence specificity and selective recognition of nucleobase functionalities which can be exploited to create DNA materials[32,33,34] and perform DNA template chemistry.[35,36,37]Nucleobase interactions have been utilized to drive self-assembly[38,39,40,41,42,43] and for achieving a biomimetic segregation/ templating approach to polymer synthesis.[44]. For micelles consisting of moderately short hydrophobic blocks, upon the addition of complementary nucleobase copolymer a decrease in size was observed but without any accompanying morphological change. For micelles formed from longer hydrophobic blocks, a morphological transition from spheres to cylinders and to smaller spheres was observed upon increasing the amount of the complementary copolymer.
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