One-pot incorporation of fluorescent dyes into sugar-immobilized PMMA particles during their growth

摘要

Reducing the number of the preparation steps is generally desirable in constructing the formation schemes of various functional materials. The present work aims at establishing the method for the one-pot incorporation of fluorescent dyes and alkylated functional sugar molecules to submicron polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) particles. The coexistence of the fluorescent dyes and functional sugar in those microparticles can open up various valuable applications. Fig.1 shows a schema of the sugar-immobilized fluorescent polymer particles. In the present work, the one-pot soap-free polymerization was employed to obtain PMMA submicron particles which were spontaneously incorporated with Rhodamine 6G (R6G) and octyl-β-D-glucopiranoside (octyl-β-D-glc). Octyl-β-D-glc was used as the functional sugar, where the octyl group in β-D-glc was anticipated to facilitate the incorporation in the PMMA polymeric matrix due to the low polarity. By adding the above fluorescent dye and functional sugar on triggering the radical polymerization of methyl methacrylate, the possibility of the one-pot formation of the three-component composite functional submicron particles was examined.