The assembly of supramolecular polymer bottlebrushes in aqueous systems is, in most cases, associated with a lateral aggregation of the supramolecular building blocks in addition to their axial stacking. Here, it is demonstrated that this limitation can be overcome by attaching three polymer chains to a central supramolecular unit that possesses a sufficiently high number of hydrogen bonding units to compensate for the increased steric strain. Therefore, a 1,3,5-benzenetrisurea-polyethylene oxide conjugate is modified with different peptide units located next to the urea groups which should facilitate self-assembly in water. For a single amino acid per arm, spherical micelles are obtained for all three tested amino acids (alanine, leucine, and phenylalanine) featuring different hydrophobicities. Only a slight increase in size and solution stability of spherical micelles is observed with increasing hydrophobicity of amino acid unit. In contrast, introducing two amino acid units per arm and thus increasing the number of hydrogen bonds per unimer molecule results in the formation of cylindrical structures, that is, supramolecular polymer bottlebrushes, despite a suppressed lateral aggregation. Consequently, it can be concluded that the number of hydrogen bonds has a more profound impact on the resulting solution morphology than the hydrophobicity of the amino acid unit.
Keywords: bottlebrush polymers; hydrogen bonds; lateral aggregation; self-assembly; supramolecular polymers.
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