Zinc-Catalyzed Highly Isoselective Ring Opening Polymerization of rac-Lactide

Srinivas Abbina; Guodong Du

doi:10.1021/mz5002959

Zinc-Catalyzed Highly Isoselective Ring Opening Polymerization of rac-Lactide

ACS Macro Lett. 2014 Jul 15;3(7):689-692. doi: 10.1021/mz5002959. Epub 2014 Jul 2.

Authors

Srinivas Abbina¹, Guodong Du¹

Affiliation

¹ Department of Chemistry, University of North Dakota , 151 Cornell Street Stop 9024, Grand Forks, North Dakota 58202, United States.

Abstract

A family of chiral zinc amido-oxazolinate complexes are shown to be highly active and isoselective initiators for the ring-opening polymerization (ROP) of rac-lactide, yielding isotactic stereoblock polylactides (PLA) with P_m up to 0.91. This represents the highest isoselectivity observed with zinc-based catalysts for ROP of rac-lactide.

Grants and funding

National Institutes of Health, United States