We would like to wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy New Year! The Editorial office will be closed from 24th December 2010 and will re-open on January 4th 2011.
We’re looking forward to 2011, which will see more high quality articles from top international polymer chemists, some great themed issues, and much more! Don’t miss out – sign up to our blog’s RSS feed!
from the Polymer Chemistry Editorial team
A new method for decorating spores with polymer nanoparticles to create an intricate surface morphology has been developed by scientists at the University of Warwick, UK.
Nicholas Ballard and Stefan Bon investigated the behaviour of these hybrid particles at the liquid–liquid interfaces. The particles show very different behaviour from their spherical analogues which shows that roughness of the surface matters.
Read the full article here: Nicholas Ballard and Stefan A. F. Bon, Polym. Chem., 2011, DOI: 10.1039/C0PY00335B
Watch the video interview on YouTube http://bit.ly/hx3vQ4
Interested to know more? Why not read Jay’s papers on ‘Self-healing and self-mendable polymers’ http://bit.ly/ii2lpS or ‘Self-healing polymers prepared via living radical polymerisation’ http://bit.ly/hPJeqk
Featured on the front cover of this issue is Separation of enantiomers on diastereomeric right- and left-handed helical poly(phenyl isocyanide)s bearing L-alanine pendants immobilized on silica gel by HPLC by Kazumi Tamura, Toshitaka Miyabe, Hiroki Iida and Eiji Yashima. In the paper diastereomeric left- and right-handed helical polyisocyanides were immobilized on silica gel via chemical bonding. They showed a complementary chiral recognition ability with the reversed elution order for some enantiomers when used as chiral stationary phases for HPLC.
The inside front cover features a communication on Thiol–isocyanate “click” reactions: rapid development of functional polymeric surfaces by Ryan M. Hensarling, Santosh B. Rahane, Arthur P. LeBlanc, Bradley J. Sparks, Evan M. White, Jason Locklin and Derek L. Patton. In the communication which was selected as a Hot Article they report that functional, micropatterned and multicomponent polymer brush surfaces can be rapidly fabricated via base-catalyzed thiol–isocyanate “click” reactions.
The back cover highlights the work of Manabu Tanaka, Masaki Koike, Kenji Miyatake and Masahiro Watanabe. Their paper which was also selected as a Hot Article is entitled Synthesis and properties of anion conductive ionomers containing fluorenyl groups for alkaline fuel cell applications.
You can read the full issue here:
I would like to introduce our new web writer, Remzi Becer (University of Warwick, UK). Remzi will be contributing articles to the Polymer Chemistry blog on the latest news of interest to the polymer chemistry community.
Remzi Becer
Remzi was born in 1980 in Izmir, Turkey. He received his BSc degree in 2003 at the Chemistry Department of the Istanbul Technical University (ITU). In 2005, he received his MSc degree in Polymer Science and Technology at the ITU. He completed his PhD study titled as Controlling Polymer Architectures in 2009 under the supervision of Ulrich S. Schubert at the Eindhoven University of Technology (The Netherlands) and the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena (Germany). Recently, he is a Marie Curie Research Fellow in the University of Warwick (United Kingdom). His research interests include high-throughput experimentation, stimuli-responsive polymers, and synthesis of glycopolymer and their interactions with lectins.
Look out for Remzi’s posts on the Polymer Chemistry blog! To make sure you don’t miss any Polymer Chemistry news sign up to the blog’s RSS feed.
Watch the full video interview here on YouTube
Interested to know more? Why not read Jian Ping Gong’s article in Polymer Chemistry.
A facile method for synthesizing free-shaped and tough double network hydrogels using physically crosslinked poly(vinyl alcohol) as an internal mold. Tasuku Nakajima, Naoyuki Takedomi, Takayuki Kurokawa, Hidemitsu Furukawa and Jian Ping Gong, Polym. Chem., 2010, 1, 693-697.
Polymer Chemistry is delighted to welcome another 9 outstanding polymer chemists to the Polymer Chemistry Advisory Board. These scientists run laboratories around the world and will help advise the Editorial Board on the direction of Polymer Chemistry as the journal grows.
The new Polymer Chemistry Advisory Board members are:
• Yoshinobu Tsujii, Kyoto University, Japan
• Masami Kamigaito, Nagoya University, Japan
• Bernadette Charleux, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, France
• Jean Fréchet, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia
• Steven Holdcroft, Simon Fraser University, Canada
• Eva Malmström, Jonsson Kungliga Tekniska högskolan, Sweden
• Maria Vicent, Prince Filipe Research Centre, Spain
• Swaminathan Sivaram, National Chemical Laboratory, India
• Mathias Destarac, Université de Toulouse, France
The full list of Polymer Chemistry Editorial Board and Advisory Board members can be found here.
The latest top ten most downloaded Polymer Chemistry articles
See the most-read papers of October 2010 here:
Polymersomes that shed their poly(ethylene glycol) shell have been developed by scientists at Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
The polymersomes are formed from block copolymers of polybutadiene-b-poly(ethylene glycol) coupled via an acid sensitive hydrazone moiety. The team found that the minimum amount of surface PEGylation needed to retain stable polymersomes was as low as five percent.
Interested to know more? Why not read the full article for free here: René P. Brinkhuis*, Taco R. Visser, Floris P. J. T. Rutjes and Jan C. M. van Hest, Polym. Chem., 2011, DOI:10.1039/C0PY00316F
