Polysaccharide derivatives are a bountiful source of materials that have high performance in a diverse variety of applications, are benign, biodegrade rather than accumulating, and are based on polymers that nature provides to us from sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide. We hypothesized that all polysaccharide-based hydrogels would be of special interest, and that by properly designing the hydrogel linkages, we could prepare self-healing and possibly even injectable hydrogels. This hypothesis was fully realized, based on novel chemistry involving a simple and selective bleach oxidation. The new hydrogels are very attractive for biomedical and other applications. We further hypothesized that by selective modification of linear dextran, we could set up the polymer perfectly for condensation at one and only one position on the entire molecule with nucleophiles. Successful realization of this hypothesis permitted us to prepare block copolymers in two simple steps from native dextran. These polysaccharide-appended block copolymers can be designed with interesting and potentially exploitable properties, including phase separation and thermal sensitivity. We will describe the confirmation of these hypotheses and the potential thereby created.

Sustainable polysaccharides as foundation for hydrogels and block copolymers

ACS Spring Meeting 2021

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