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Soft Matter

Where physics meets chemistry meets biology for fundamental soft matter research.



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Soft Matter, 2008, 4, 1066 - 1071, DOI: 10.1039/b715608a

Alternating polymer vesicles

Dan Wu, Ludmila Abezgauz, Dganit Danino, Chia-Chi Ho and Carlos C. Co

We demonstrate here that the formation of polymer vesicles is not the exclusive realm of amphiphilic block copolymers. The natural alternating conjugation of hydrophobic alkyl maleates and hydrophilic polyhydroxy vinyl ethers under free-radical polymerization conditions also yields polymers with sufficient backbone amphiphilicity to form vesicles. In contrast to conventional polymersomes, these polymer vesicles have thin flexible shells capable of forming ultra-small unilamellar vesicles in water as confirmed by cryogenic-transmission electron microscopy (cryo-TEM), small-angle neutron scattering (SANS), and dynamic light scattering (DLS). The encapsulation and release characteristics of these alternating polymer vesicles are, however, similar to their surfactant counterparts.

Graphical abstract image for this article (ID: b715608a)