High-yield one-pot synthesis of polyrotaxanes with tunable well-defined threading ratios over a wide range

Takako Noritomi; Lan Jiang; Hideaki Yokoyama; Koichi Mayumi; Kohzo Ito

doi:10.1039/d1ra09475k

High-yield one-pot synthesis of polyrotaxanes with tunable well-defined threading ratios over a wide range

RSC Adv. 2022 Jan 30;12(7):3796-3800. doi: 10.1039/d1ra09475k. eCollection 2022 Jan 28.

Authors

Takako Noritomi¹, Lan Jiang¹, Hideaki Yokoyama¹, Koichi Mayumi^{1

2}, Kohzo Ito¹

Affiliations

¹ Material Innovation Research Center (MIRC) and Department of Advanced Materials Science, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo 5-1-5 Kashiwanoha Kashiwa Chiba 277-8561 Japan kohzo@edu.k.u-tokyo.ac.jp.
² The Institute for Solid State Physics, The University of Tokyo 5-1-5 Kashiwanoha Kashiwa Chiba 277-8581 Japan kmayumi@g.ecc.u-tokyo.ac.jp.

Abstract

In this work, we report a high-yield one-pot synthesis of polyrotaxane (PR), composed of (2-hydroxypropyl)-α-cyclodextrin (hpCD) and polyethylene glycol (PEG), with well-defined hpCD threading ratios controllable across a wide range from 0.64% to 10%. In hpCD/PEG aqueous solutions, hpCDs are well dispersed and threaded spontaneously into hpCDs to form a pseudo-PR (pPR) structure. The homogeneous dispersion of hpCDs results in a well-defined threading ratio of hpCDs on PEG, which is suggested by the fact that the dispersity of the molecular weight distribution of PR is almost the same as that of pure PEG. The well-defined hpCD threading ratio of the PRs can be controlled over a wide range by tuning the hpCD concentration in the pPR solutions.