• Polymer(Korea)
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• v.31 no.6
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• pp.550-554
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• 2007

Atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP) has been widely used in bioconjugation as it is an efficient and facile method to prepare polymers with pre-designed structures. Quite often, bioconjugation with proteins employs primary amines in proteins as a functional group to attach an initiator. When 2-bromoisobutryl bromide, the most widely used precursor for ATRP initiator, is used, ${\alpha}-halo$ amide initiating groups are formed in the proteins, which are known to exhibit slow initiation behavior in the ATRP process. Here we studied the ATRP of [poly(ethylene glycol)methyl ether] methacrylate (PEGMA) using amide-based initiator. PEGMA differs for both the nature and size of the polymer side branches and shows good solubility in water and a property that made it an ideal candidate for biomaterials. While normal ATRP produced ill-defined p(PEGMA) with amide based initiators, the halogen exchange method and the external additional of deactivator effectively improved the control of ATRP of PEGMA.

• Macromolecular Research
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.307-312
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• 2009

Core-shell hydrogel nanocomposite was fabricated by encapsulating a silica-gold nanoshell (SGNS) with poly(N-isopropylacrylamide-co-acrylic acid) (PNIPAM-co-AAc) copolymer. The oleylamine-functionalized SONS was used as a nanotemplate for the shell-layer growth of hydrogel copolymer. APS (ammonium persulfate) was used as a polymerization initiator to produce a hydrogel-encapsulated SGNS (H-SGNS). The amounts of NIPAM (N-isopropylacrylamide) monomers were optimized to reproduce the hydrogel-encapsulated SGNS. The shell-layer thickness was increased with the increase of polymerization time and no further increase in the shell-layer thickness was clearly observed over 16 h. H-SGNS exhibited the systematic changes of particle size corresponding to the variation of pH and temperature, which was originated from hydrogen-bonding interaction between PNIPAM amide groups and water, as well as electrostatic forces attributed by the ionization of carboxylic groups in acrylic acid.