LCPs from Biological Origin and Their Networks

2 LCPs from Biological Origin and Their Networks 

Liquid crystalline derivatives of the polysaccharide cellulose are characterized by wormlike chains with modest persistence lengths in the order of around ten nanometers [175] and modest axial ratios [166,270]. When the lyotropic liquid crystallinity of hydroxypropyl cellulose was first discovered [251], it was 

The first, and until now apparently the only, cellulose derivative converted into a permanently crosslinked LCP network is hydroxypropyl cellulose (HPC) [272-276]. The HPC chains were either first derivatized with groups crosslink-able in a second step by photoinitiation [272,274,276] or were directly reacted with di- or higher-functional crosslinking moiety [273,275] to produce a crosslinked network. Typical bridging groups connecting saccharide rings in adjacent chains, may be  

The length and flexibility of the crosslinking residue combines with the overall wormlike nature of the cellulose backbone to allow the main-chains to adopt the most efficient packing, generally parallel, and through it achieve the liquid crystalline state. 

3 Networks with Uniform Main-Chain Mesogenicity and Flexible Crosslinking Residues 

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