ortho-Phenylenes, which adopt helical geometries, are one of simplest classes of aromatic foldamers. Due to the rotations from one or more internal torsional angles, this helical geometry can change to give a misfolded structure. These folding and misfolding conformational changes are slow on the NMR timescale at or below room temperature, therefore allowing us to detect changes in folding via 1H NMR spectroscopy. Herein, we synthesize hexamer o-phenylenes that are coupled with a RAFT chain transfer agent (CTA) on each repeat unit. These CTA functionalized o-phenylenes are polymerized using different acrylate monomers via PET-RAFT to give fully functionalized star shaped polymers with o-phenylene cores. The steric bulk on the acrylate monomer units is varied systematically, and we assess the twisting of the o-phenylene backbone using 1H NMR spectroscopy to see whether the folding state of the polymeric core changes.

RAFT polymerization of star polymers with ortho-phenylene cores

ACS Fall 2021

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