Polymer Chemistry Blog

The Polymer Chemistry blog has a new writer, Dr Cyrille Boyer. Cyrille will be joining Remzi Becer and Julien Nicolas in bringing you weekly ‘Author of the Week’ and ‘Paper of the Week’ posts, in addition to conference and other polymer chemistry news. We’d like to give Cyrille a warm welcome, more information on him can be found below…

Dr. Cyrille Boyer received his Ph-D in polymer chemistry from the University of Montpellier II (awarded in 2006). His Ph-D was in collaboration with Solvay-Solexis and devoted to the synthesis of new graft copolymers using grafting “to”. At the end of his PhD, he undertook an engineer position with Dupont Performance and Elastomers, dealing with the synthesis of original fluorinated elastomers. Later, he joined the Centre for Advanced Macromolecular Design (CAMD) as a senior research fellow under the guidance of Prof. Tom Davis. Since 2010, he is a lecturer in the School of Chemical Engineering and an Australian Research Council Fellow (APD-ARC). In 2011, he joined the UNSW Australian Centre for NanoMedicine as a group leader to develop new polymeric nanoparticles for drug delivery and gene therapy. The same year, Cyrille started a new research area on the preparation of new hybrid nanoparticles/polymers for hydrogen storage in collaboration with Francois Aguey-Zinsou (School of Chemical Engineering). Cyrille’s research interests mainly cover the preparation of well-defined polymers for drug delivery and siRNA delivery, protein polymer conjugates, hybrid organic-inorganic nanoparticles for imaging and energy storage. He is also working to develop new controlled radical polymerization. He has co-authored over 90 peer-reviewed research papers, including book chapters and international patents.

In the search for new haircare products, scientists in the UK have developed a new method to chemically modify hair with polymers.

The polymer can be covalently grafted to the surface of hair under mild conditions

Polymers are present within many haircare products and are used to modify the appearance of hair, for example to make it straighter or to change its colour. These polymers modify the surface of the hair and as they are used in a personal and uncontrolled setting, mild and efficient chemistry is required. Typically, there is a non-covalent interaction between the polymer and hair; however, scientists are now looking at methods to form a covalent bond between the polymer and hair in the hope of enhancing the polymer’s effects.

David Haddleton and coworkers at the University of Warwick, in collaboration with Unilever, have demonstrated for the first time the ability to covalently bond polymers synthesised by cobalt catalysed chain transfer polymerisation (CCTP) to hair.

CCTP is a method to synthesise macromonomers that have a reactive unsaturated vinyl end-group, which can react with thiol groups found on the surface of hair using thiol-ene click chemistry under mild conditions. In addition, the team also showed that a fluorescent tag could be attached to the polymer, demonstrating the further modification of the polymer. ‘The use of low-cost controlled polymerisation methods to give efficient and specific surface modification onto surfaces is highly exciting,’ says Ezat Khoshdel from Unilever.

Now that it is known that polymers can be covalently bound to hair, the team is ‘interested in what type of properties we can change, and what are essentially the limitations of what we are doing,’ says Haddleton.

Greg Qiao, an expert in polymer chemistry at the University of Melbourne, Australia, says that ‘the work provides a general method for modification of a biological surface and has the potential to produce new healthcare products for human hair’.

Biological surface modification by ‘thiol-ene’ addition of polymers synthesised by catalytic chain transfer polymerisation (CCTP)
Stacy Slavin, Ezat Khoshdel and David M. Haddleton
DOI: 10.1039/C2PY20040F

Read the original Chemistry World article here

The latest issue of Polymer Chemistry is now online. You can read the full issue here.

The outside front cover features an article on A facile and fast method for the functionalization of polymersomes by photoinduced cycloaddition chemistry by Hans-Peter M. de Hoog, Madhavan Nallani and Bo Liedberg.

Issue 2 contains the following Review articles:

• Solution-processable triarylamine-based electroactive high performance polymers for anodically electrochromic applications     
• Recent progress on phosphonate vinyl monomers and polymers therefore obtained by radical (co)polymerization    
• Synthesis of poly(p-phenylene vinylene) materials via the precursor routes
• Hyperbranched polyethylenes by chain walking polymerization: synthesis, properties, functionalization, and applications 

To keep up-to-date with all the latest research, sign up for the journal’s e-alerts or RSS feeds or follow Polymer Chemistry on Twitter or Facebook.

Free online access to Polymer Chemistry will cease at the start of 2012, but there is still time to take a look at all the articles we’ve published so far free of charge.

We hope you’ve enjoyed – and will continue to enjoy – reading the articles we publish. One of the highlights of the last year was the Emerging Investigators Issue with Rachel O’Reilly and Andrew Dove as the guest editors which gives a flavour of some of the most exciting research being discovered in these recently established labs.  Another highlight was the Polymer Bioconjugates themed issue guest edited by Jan van Hest and Brent Sumerlin which gives an overview of this exciting and fast developing area.

Don’t forget all the latest Advanced Articles are listed on the Polymer Chemistry home page and the most popular articles are shown on the Most Read Articles tab.

If you would like to continue to receive access to Polymer Chemistry in 2012 please recommend Polymer Chemistry to your librarian.

The first issue of Polymer Chemistry, 2012, is now online. You can read the full issue here:

Dave Haddleton and Liz Davies look over Polymer Chemistry’s highlights of the past year and look forward to 2012 in their Editorial.  

The outside front cover features an article on Self-assembled amino acids and dipeptides as noncovalent hydrogels for tissue engineering by Derek M. Ryan and Bradley L. Nilsson.

Aqueous RAFT/MADIX polymerisation of N-vinyl pyrrolidone at ambient temperature is the article highlighted on the inside front cover by Aymeric Guinaudeau, Stéphane Mazières, D. James Wilson and Mathias Destarac.

Issue 1 contains the following Review articles:

• Self-assembled amino acids and dipeptides as noncovalent hydrogels for tissue engineering  
• Constructing star polymers via modular ligation strategies 
• Preparation and applications of novel fluoroalkyl end-capped oligomeric nanocomposites  
• Azlactone-functionalized polymers as reactive platforms for the design of advanced materials: Progress in the last ten years 

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