Thermoresponsive Star Dendronized Polymers as Smart Nanoboxes

TL;DR

Scientists created smart nanoboxes using star-shaped polymers that can change their structure with temperature, making them useful for drug delivery and sensing.

Contribution

A new type of thermoresponsive star dendronized polymer with tunable encapsulation and release properties is synthesized and characterized.

Findings

The star polymers have a spherical core–shell structure with gold nanoparticles at the core and dendronized arms.

Thermoresponsiveness of the polymers depends on grafting density and molecular weight of the arms.

The polymers can encapsulate guest molecules and release them through thermal modulation.

Abstract

Star polymers with dense shell structures exhibit unique advantages in molecule encapsulation. The incorporation of dendronized polymers as arms into star polymers enables the formation of spherical core–shell structures with high-density chain stacking, which is of great significance for enhancing their encapsulation capabilities. Here, we report on the synthesis of a new type of star dendronized polymer consisting of oligoethylene glycol (OEG)-based dendronized polymers as the arms and gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) as the core. Due to the thickness of individual dendronized polymer arms, the morphology of star dendronized polymers was directly visualized by an atomic force microscope (AFM). These star polymers inherit characteristic thermoresponsiveness from the OEG-based dendronized linear polymers, and their thermoresponsive behavior depends mainly on the grafting density of polymer chains on the AuNP cores and the molecular weights of the polymer arms. More importantly, these star dendronized polymers exhibit a tunable encapsulation capacity to guest molecules, which can be modulated through thermally induced aggregation. By virtue of these peculiarities, these thermoresponsive star dendronized polymers with tailorable release properties hold promise as smart nanoboxes for bio-applications, including drug delivery and biosensing.

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