Polythiolactone‐Decorated Silica Particles: A Versatile Approach for Surface Functionalization, Catalysis and Encapsulation

Abstract

Invited for the cover of this issue is the group of Bart Jan Ravoo at Westfälische Wilhelms‐Universität Münster. The image depicts the “universal” post‐modification of silica particles coated with a polythiolactone polymer shell. Read the full text of the article at 10.1002/chem.202100547.

Arylazopyrazole-Modified Thiolactone Acrylate Copolymer Brushes for Tuneable and Photoresponsive Wettability of Glass Surfaces

“…This also corresponds well to our previously published work where similar conditions were employed to decorate silica particles . Compared to the work published by Patton et al., we did not observe a swelling of the brushes after post-modification, as shown in Figure D.…”

“…This also corresponds well to our previously published work where similar conditions were employed to decorate silica particles. 57 Compared to the work published by Patton et al, 56 we did not observe a swelling of the brushes after postmodification, as shown in Figure 1D. This difference is probably due to the lower ratio of thiolactone units available for the reaction compared to the homopolymers of Patton et al…”

“…52,53 As shown in Scheme 1, we used polythiolactone polymer brushes as previous studies 54,55 have shown their remarkable versatility in terms of suitable substrates for post-modification, for example, Patton and co-workers demonstrated this in their work on thiolactone homopolymer brushes which they grafted from silicon using microwave-assisted surface-initiated polymerization, 56 and our group also successfully employed a polythiolactone copolymer to decorate silica particles using post-modification to tailor it to different applications. 57 The viability of using polymers post-modified with a photoswitch for wetting applications was also demonstrated by Ruḧe and co-workers who employed polymers with active ester groups. 17 It should be noted that this post-modification route simplified the synthetic effort as only a single acrylate monomer had to be synthesized on a larger scale with less AAP amines being required for post-modification compared to our previous studies on photoresponsive polymer brushes which required more than a gram of AAP acrylate per batch of up to six substrates.…”

“…As shown in Scheme , we used polythiolactone polymer brushes as previous studies , have shown their remarkable versatility in terms of suitable substrates for post-modification, for example, Patton and co-workers demonstrated this in their work on thiolactone homopolymer brushes which they grafted from silicon using microwave-assisted surface-initiated polymerization, and our group also successfully employed a polythiolactone copolymer to decorate silica particles using post-modification to tailor it to different applications . The viability of using polymers post-modified with a photoswitch for wetting applications was also demonstrated by Rühe and co-workers who employed polymers with active ester groups .…”