Multicompartment Micelles Formed by Self‐Assembly of Linear ABC Triblock Copolymers in Aqueous Medium

Abstract

Like a doughnut with a raspberry filling: ABC triblock copolymers, composed of a hydrophilic block with morpholinium units (blue in the picture), a hydrophobic hydrocarbon block (red), and a hydrophobic fluorocarbon‐rich block (black), self‐assemble in water to form multicompartment micelles with a hydrophilic corona and a hydrophobic core with nanometer‐scale subdomains.

Self-assembled Structures from Amphiphilic Peptides

“…[44][45][46] Similarly our peptidic analogues provide new opportunities, such as acting as a template for ordered Au-NPs. Therefore, we elongated the peptide C-terminus with a cysteine (Ac-X 3 -gT-C) for a covalent linkage to Au-NPs, to introduce them within the hydrophobic micellar cores of the beads.…”

New micellar morphologies from amphiphilic block copolymers: disks, toroids and bicontinuous micelles

“…2a) most commonly formed by linear ABC type block copolymers where A is the hydrophilic block and B and C are hydrophobic blocks with poor thermodynamic compatibility. [32][33][34] It is this high thermodynamic incompatibility, represented by a high Flory-Huggins interaction parameter (c), which drives the phase separation within the micellar hydrophobic core. The desire for the phase separated regions to solubilise different materials and the concomitant need for block incompatibility, triggered a widespread use of alkyl-and perfluoro-copolymer hydrophobic blocks as the immiscible components in multi-compartment micelles (e.g.…”

Electrostatic hierarchical co-assembly in aqueous solutions of two oppositely charged double hydrophilic diblock copolymers

“…Such 'patchy micelles' (also known as 'raspberry-like' micelles, micelles with a 'spheres-on-sphere' morphology, or 'multicompartment (core) micelles') have been achieved lately in a number of micellar systems consisting of self-assembled terpolymers and H-bonded diblock and triblock copolymers, that were typically asymmetric; that is, with a large asymmetry in size and/ or abundance between the two incompatible core-forming blocks (see for example Refs. [47][48][49][50]) or corona-forming blocks (see for example Refs. [51][52][53]).…”