In Nature, biological membranes are composed of several components, which have been found to display nanometer and micrometer surface domains, called �rafts�.1 Such domains play an important role in many biological processes such as cellular signaling, membrane trafficking and membrane modeling.Our research focuses on the design of these complex artificial systems using synthetic membrane forming diblock copolymers as main constituents. These polymeric systems, a.k.a. polymersomes have recently yielded vesicles with patterned surfaces, using binary mixtures of diblock copolymers. Their surface topology could be controlled by the molar ratio of both block copolymer chains as well as their molecular weight.2,3 However, it was observed that such systems evolve upon ageing towards asymmetric polymersomes, where phase segregation of diblock copolymers occurred.To slow down this phenomenon, we propose to combine a diblock copolymer AB and a triblock copolymer ABC to prepare patchy polymersomes. In that case, the triblock copolymer would stabilize the patterns within the membrane, thus acting as a lineactant (Figure 1a). To validate this concept, series of polymersomes made of AB and ABC block copolymers were prepared and characterized using TEM, DLS and cryo-TEM. Systematic analysis using FFT filtering was performed on the images to estimate the size of patterns. From these experiments, we observed the formation of patterns within polymersome membrane (Figure 1b and 1c), whose size varies as a function of copolymer mixture composition. In addition, these patterns were shown to be stable over 1 month, thus validating our concept.(1) Simons, K.; Ikonen, E. Nature 1997  , 387, 569.(2) Massignani, M.; LoPresti, C.; Blanazs, A.; Madsen, J.; Armes, S. P.; Lewis, A. L.; Battaglia, G. Small 2009  , 5, 2424.(3) LoPresti, C.; Massignani, M.; Fernyhough, C.; Blanazs, A.; Ryan, A. J.; Madsen, J.; Warren, N. J.; Armes, S. P.; Lewis, A. L.; Chirasatitsin, S.; Engler, A. J.; Battaglia, G. ACS Nano 2011  , 5, 1775.

Design of patchy polymersomes with topological surface patterns at the nanoscale

248th National Meeting (2014)

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