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A series of ether group and amino group cosubstitutent phosphazene copolymers was synthesized and characterized by a combination of NMR, elemental analysis, and FTIR spectroscopy. The length of the alkyl group in the amino side chain and the content of the methoxyethoxyethoxy (MEE) substituent on the polymer properties were varied. Dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA) demonstrated that the cosubstitutent polymers prepared have better mechanical properties than the ether homopolyphosphazene, poly[bis(2-methoxyethoxy)ethoxy]phosphazene, MEEP. The copolymers that possessed multiple electron-donor coordination sites, nitrogen and oxygen atoms, were complexed with various amounts of lithium perchlorate (LiClO 4) to form polymer electrolytes. The ionic conductivity of the polymer electrolytes were determined by an impedance analyzer in a temperature range of 30-80 °C. According to those results, the conductivities of the prepared polymer electrolytes increased according to the rise in the MEE side chain contents and reached optima at F ) 0.2-0.25. The best conductivity obtained is 2.2 × 10 -5 S/cm for CPE-3A with F ) 0.25.

In this study, pure silica nanofibers (SNFs) were fabricated by the electrospinning technique. Subsequently, the as-prepared SNFs were modified with (3-aminopropyl) trimethoxysilane (APTS) for applications in neural tissue engineering. The structure and properties of the as-prepared SNFs and the modified SNFs (SNFAPxM, x ¼ 1-3) were evaluated with FTIR, TGA, nitrogen adsorption/desorption isotherms, and SEM. It was found that the surface hydrophilicity of SNF-APxM was lowered upon increasing the amino alkyl group content. The SEM and confocal images revealed that neural stem cells (NSCs) cultured on the electrospun SNFs and SNF-APxM substrates were elongated along the fibers in comparison to poly-Dlysine-coated (PDL-coated) substrate. In addition, a higher degree of proliferation and more responsive cells were observed for the NSCs cultured on the SNF-AP3M substrate than those on the SNFs and the PDL-coated substrates. The results indicated that the APTS-modified silica nanofibers can be potential substrates for regulating growth and differentiation of NSCs in culture.