Synthesis of Polyelectrolyte Cylindrical Brushes

The grafting through strategy means the preparation of cylindrical brushes by the polymerization of preformed MMs. This was the first method in the synthesis of cylindrical brushes. For the first time, Tsukahara et al. [108] successfully obtained cylindrical brushes by the radical polymerization of MMs. Short polymer chains with a polymerizable vinyl chain end were first made by anionic polymerization and sequential end-functionalization. Further radical polymerizations of the premade MMs yielded cylindrical brushes with uniform side chains. This method was then further employed by Schmidt et al. [109, 119-121] and Ishizu et al. [122-127] to 

For the grafting of the side chains, different controlled polymerization techniques were also applied. In addition to the rare cases of ring-opening polymerizations 

So far, the grafting from strategy has proven to be the most successful one for the preparation of cylindrical brushes. Both anionic [30, 31, 142, 143] and cationic [29] polyelectrolyte cylindrical brushes with well-defined backbones and side chains were prepared. We have also prepared core-shell brushes with PAA as the core or shell, which will be discussed later [30, 31], Recently we have been able to prepare strong anionic brushes with sulfonate groups by direct ATRP of ionic monomers in organic solvent [144], 

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