posted on 2022-11-22, 21:44authored byHao Yu, Falon C. Kalutantirige, Lehan Yao, Charles M. Schroeder, Qian Chen, Jeffrey S. Moore
Recent
advances in chemical synthesis have created new methodologies
for synthesizing sequence-controlled synthetic polymers, but rational
design of monomer sequence for desired properties remains challenging.
In this work, we synthesize periodic polymers with repetitive segments
using a sequence-controlled ring-opening metathesis polymerization
(ROMP) method, which draws inspiration from proteins containing repetitive
sequence motifs. The repetitive segment architecture is shown to dramatically
affect the self-assembly behavior of these materials. Our results
show that polymers with identical repetitive sequences assemble into
uniform spherical nanoparticles after thermal annealing, whereas copolymers
with random placement of segments with different sequences exhibit
disordered assemblies without a well-defined morphology. Overall,
these results bring a new understanding to the role of periodic repetitive
sequences in polymer assembly.