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Interfacial assembly of dendritic microcapsules with host-guest chemistry.


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Authors

Zheng, Yu 
Parker, Richard M 
Wu, Yuchao 

Abstract

The self-assembly of nanoscale materials to form hierarchically ordered structures promises new opportunities in drug delivery, as well as magnetic materials and devices. Herein, we report a simple means to promote the self-assembly of two polymers with functional groups at a water-chloroform interface using microfluidic technology. Two polymeric layers can be assembled and disassembled at the droplet interface using the efficiency of cucurbit[8]uril (CB[8]) host-guest supramolecular chemistry. The microcapsules produced are extremely monodisperse in size and can encapsulate target molecules in a robust, well-defined manner. In addition, we exploit a dendritic copolymer architecture to trap a small hydrophilic molecule in the microcapsule skin as cargo. This demonstrates not only the ability to encapsulate small molecules but also the ability to orthogonally store both hydrophilic and hydrophobic cargos within a single microcapsule. The interfacially assembled supramolecular microcapsules can benefit from the diversity of polymeric materials, allowing for fine control over the microcapsule properties.

Description

Keywords

0303 Macromolecular and Materials Chemistry, 0306 Physical Chemistry (incl. Structural), Bioengineering, Biotechnology

Journal Title

Nat Commun

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

2041-1723
2041-1723

Volume Title

5

Publisher

Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Sponsorship
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/H046593/1)
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/K503496/1)
European Research Council (240629)
This work was supported by the Engineering Physical Sciences Research Council, Institutional Sponsorship 2012-University of Cambridge EP/K503496/1 and the Translational Grant EP/H046593/1; Dr. Yu Zheng and Dr. Richard M. Parker were also funded from the Starting Investigator grant ASPiRe (No. 240629) from the European Research Council and the Isaac Newton Trust research grant No. 13.7(c).