123rd General Meeting of the KCS

Type Poster Presentation
Area Polymer Chemistry
Room No. Exhibition Hall 2
Time 4월 19일 (금요일) 11:00~12:30
Code POLY.P-38
Subject Conformation-controlled Supramolecular Polymerization of Host-guest Complexes
Authors Seoyeon Choi, Rahul Dev Mukhopadhyay1,*, Wooseup Hwang2, Kangkyun Baek3,*, Kimoon Kim2,*
Devision of Advanced Material Science , Pohang University of Science and Technology, Korea
1Center for Self-assembly and Complexity (CSC), Institute for Basic Science (IBS), Korea
2Department of Chemistry, Pohang University of Science and Technology, Korea
3Center for Self-assembly and Complexity, Institute for Basic Science, Korea
Abstract Supramolecular polymers are easy to handle due to their low viscosity, resulting from the polymeric arrays of monomer units, held together by reversible non-covalent interactions. However, most supramolecular polymers are formed by a step-growth mechanism wherein it is difficult to attain uniform polymer chain growth and dispersity. Very recently, supramolecular systems, which undergoes a living polymerization process, has gained attention to overcome the aforementioned issues. In the living polymerization process, the last monomer unit on each polymeric array remains active until all monomer units are consumed completely and acts as an initiating point or seed for a new polymeric chain. Cucurbit[8]urils are known to form heteroternary complexes through charge-transfer interactions inside their hydrophobic cavity. The competitive exchange between guests, due to different association constants can be utilized to switch between different host-guest complexes. Herein, we have designed guest molecules consisting of donor and acceptor parts bridged by linkers, which are flexible enough to initiate polymer growth by undergoing a conformational change in presence of minuscule amount of a competing guest molecule. The formation of the heteroternary complex in solution and supramolecular polymer growth were investigated using various spectroscopic and microscopic techniques as well as computational simulations. Whether this unique supramolecular polymerization can be further exploited as a system undergoing living polymerization is currently under progress. This study may expand the scope of application of supramolecular host-guest chemistry and achieve better control over supramolecular polymerization.
E-mail choisy93@postech.ac.kr