Preparation Of Water-soluble Conjugated Polymer Brush/Inorganic Nanocomposite For Bioapplications

Water-soluble nanocomposites can be fabricated by combining functional inorganic nanoparticles and conjugated polymers with excellent photoelectric properties. Currently, the application of these materials in the field of biomedical research is one of the hot spots. But these materials have many drawbacks, such as poor water-solubility, bad biocompatibility, low fluorescence efficiency as well as unstable photophysical properties.Water-soluble conjugated polymer brush has excellent photophysical properties owning to their high water-solubility; well dispersion; space ductility and good biocompatibility. According to the outstanding characteristic of water-soluble conjugated polymer brush, this paper proposes the concept of integrating water-soluble conjugated polymers brush with nanoparticles attempting to address the above mentioned problems. Firstly, we prepared the nanocomposite with both fluorescence and magnetic properties by surface in situ polymerization. In view of its complex synthesis steps as well as the fluorescence quenching in water, we further synthesized conjugated polymer brush with strong fluorescence. Followed by making heavy use of the interaction of polymer brush itself amphiphilic as well as rich functional groups with nanomaterials, we quickly realized surface modification of a series of nanomaterials (iron oxide, rare earth upconversion nanoparticles as well as graphene oxide) through a simple blend, which endows their good water-solubility, biocompatibility, stability and multifunctional properties. Dynamic light scattering (DLS), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), UV-vis absorption, fluorescence emission spectra and other characterization techniques were used to study the morphology and optoelectronic properties. Taking advantage of their multifunctional properties, we further developed the application of these nanocomposites in the field of multi-mode biological imaging (focused on magnetic resonance imaging and fluorescence Imaging), and siRNA delivery. The research results indicate that these nanocomposites exhibit great potential in bioapplication.