Multi-morphological self-assembled structures of a rod-coil organometallic oligomer

Abstract

A rod-coil amphiphilic organometallic oligomer based on o-ferrocenylcarbonyl benzoic acid (FcBA) as hydrophobic short rod and poly(ethylene glycol) 17 (PEG 17 ) as hydrophilic coil chain was synthesized via Friedel-Crafts acylation and esterification reaction and characterized by 1 H-NMR and FT-IR analyses. The rod-coil oligomer FcBA-PEG 17 with short-rod insoluble FcBA segment and long-coil PEG 17 segment could self-assemble into multi-morphological aggregates in water such as sphere, rod, strip and vesicle at different initial concentrations, which were characterized by transmission electron microscopy. Interestingly, two different kinds of vesicles were observed, where disfigured vesicles formed at low initial concentration and ideal vesicles at high initial concentration. And the disfigured vesicles can be transferred into ideal vesicles at lower initial concentration through the threading of rigid α-CDs onto the coil PEG 17 chains. A possible mechanism for the formation of multi-morphological self-assembled micelles was also proposed.

Synthesis and crystal structures of 2-(ferrocenylcarbonyl)benzoic acid and 3-ferrocenylphthalide

“…Ferrocene being a close analog of ruthenocene, we decided to pursue the synthesis of ferrocene-fused quinones (Nesmeyanov et al, 1966;Pokharel, 2012), starting from ferrocene itself as the aromatic reagent. As the first step of this synthetic route, we prepared 2-ferrocenylcarbonyl benzoic acid, 1, following a previously reported procedure (Shen et al, 2012;Xu et al, 2017). The published procedure uses dichloromethane as the reaction solvent.…”

Amphiphilic hybrids containing inorganic constituent: More than soap

“…Li et al described a Rh Cp I SURF used in enantioselective catalysis [42]. An inverted, hydropho bic hydrophilic motif was presented by Shen et al with an I SURF con taining ferrocene in the hydrophobic moiety [43]. Fascinating work was also presented by Gohy et al on ferrocenylsilane block copolymers showing numerous amphiphilic properties [44].…”