Abstract
In response to the shortage of petroleum resources and the growing need for sustainable development, cellulose-based amphiphilic copolymers have emerged as a new generation of value-added functional nanostructures from biomass resources. In this article, 17 amphiphilic hydroxyethyl cellulose-based graft copolymers with different side chains, including poly(lactide), poly(ε-caprolactone) and poly(p-dioxanone), were synthesized via homogeneous ring opening polymerization in ionic liquid 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium chloride and characterized by FT-IR, 1H NMR, thermogravimetric analysis and gel permeation chromatography. The resultant copolymers can self-assemble into micelles with a low critical micelle concentration that varies in the range of 0.03–0.24 mg/ml. TEM observations revealed the obtained micelles had a spherical and well-distributed morphology, and DLS analysis showed the nanoscaled sizes were between 40 and 150 nm. These HEC-based micelles can be used as nano-sized vesicles and have great latent forces in drug delivery systems.
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Acknowledgments
This work was financially supported by the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University (grant no. NCET-13-0215), the Science and Technology Program of Guangzhou, China (grant no. 2014J4100039) and Open Foundation of State Key Laboratory of Pulp and Paper Engineering, South China University of Technology (grant no. 201312).
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Wenjiao Ge and Yanzhu Guo have contributed equally to this work and are considered first co-authors.
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Ge, W., Guo, Y., Zhong, H. et al. Synthesis, characterization, and micellar behaviors of hydroxyethyl cellulose-graft-poly(lactide/ε-caprolactone/p-dioxanone). Cellulose 22, 2365–2374 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10570-015-0663-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10570-015-0663-6