Umarov Akmal Z, Collins Joseph, Nikitina Evgeniia A, Moutsios Ioannis, Rosenthal Martin, Dobrynin Andrey V, Sheiko Sergei S, Ivanov Dimitri A
Faculty of Chemistry, Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU), GSP-1, 1-3 Leninskiye Gory, Moscow, 119991, Russian Federation.
Department of Chemistry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599-3290, USA.
Macromol Rapid Commun. 2025 Jan;46(1):e2400569. doi: 10.1002/marc.202400569. Epub 2024 Oct 10.
Self-assembled networks of bottlebrush copolymers are promising materials for biomedical applications due to a unique combination of ultra-softness and strain-adaptive stiffening, characteristic of soft biological tissues. Transitioning from ABA linear-brush-linear triblock copolymers to A-g-B bottlebrush graft copolymer architectures allows significant increasing the mechanical strength of thermoplastic elastomers. Using real-time synchrotron small-angle X-ray scattering, it is shown that annealing of A-g-B elastomers in a selective solvent for the linear A blocks allows for substantial network reconfiguration, resulting in an increase of both the A domain size and the distance between the domains. The corresponding increases in the aggregation number and extension of bottlebrush strands lead to a significant increase of the strain-stiffening parameter up to 0.7, approaching values characteristic of the brain and skin tissues. Network reconfiguration without disassembly is an efficient approach to adjusting the mechanical performance of tissue-mimetic materials to meet the needs of diverse biomedical applications.
由于具有超柔软性和应变适应性硬化的独特组合，这是软生物组织的特征，瓶刷共聚物的自组装网络是生物医学应用中有前景的材料。从ABA线性刷-线性三嵌段共聚物转变为A-g-B瓶刷接枝共聚物结构可显著提高热塑性弹性体的机械强度。使用实时同步加速器小角X射线散射表明，在用于线性A嵌段的选择性溶剂中对A-g-B弹性体进行退火可实现大量的网络重构，导致A域尺寸和域之间距离的增加。瓶刷链的聚集数和伸展的相应增加导致应变硬化参数显著增加，高达0.7，接近大脑和皮肤组织的特征值。不解体的网络重构是调整仿组织材料的机械性能以满足各种生物医学应用需求的有效方法。
