Research Highlights

• Subject Categories:
  • Chemistry
  • Materials

Published online: 17 June 2009 | doi:10.1038/nchina.2009.128

Polymer chemistry: Versatile gelators

Anne Pichon

Introduction

© (2009) ACS

Gels have found use in a wide range of applications, including cosmetics, drug delivery and tissue engineering. For this reason, molecules that can induce gelation in many different solvents have attracted a great deal of interest. So far, numerous gelators based on dendrons or dendrimers — highly branched molecules with tuneable structures and chemical properties — have been reported, but all previous examples contain long alkyl chains and hydrogen-bonding groups. It remains a challenge to prepare dendritic gelators without these moieties.

Yanmei He, Qinghua Fan and co-workers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing¹ have now prepared dendritic gelators based on benzene rings bearing functional ether groups. They prepared four generations of dendrimer molecules based on the same motif but with increasing levels of complexity, and functionalized their periphery with ester groups.

The dendrimers formed gels in a wide range of solvents, including aromatic, polar organic and aqueous solutions. The structure of the core was crucial to the gelation process, and the morphology of the resultant materials varied markedly depending on the dendrimer generation and the solvent.

Characterization of the materials revealed that gelation proceeded through aromatic stacking interactions between the dendrimers.

The authors of this work are from:
Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, CAS Key Laboratory of Molecular Recognition and Function, Institute of Chemistry and Graduate School, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.

Reference

1. Feng, Y. et al. Peripherally dimethyl isophthalate-functionalized poly(benzyl ether) dendrons: a new kind of unprecedented highly efficient organogelators. J. Am. Chem. Soc. doi:10.1021/ja901501j (2009). | Article |