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1. Structure of Polymer-Grafted Nanoparticle Melts

   https://doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.0c06134  

   Midya, Jiarul; Rubinstein, Michael; Kumar, Sanat K.; Nikoubashman, Arash (November 2020, ACS Nano)

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2. Glycopolymer Microarrays with Sub‐Femtomolar Avidity for Glycan Binding Proteins Prepared by Grafted‐To/Grafted‐From Photopolymerizations

   https://doi.org/10.1002/anie.202105729  

   Braunschweig, Adam B; Valles, Daniel J.; Zholdassov, Yerzhan; Korpanty, Joanna; Uddin, Samiah; Naeem, Yasir; Mootoo, David R.; Gianneschi, Nathan C. (January 2021, Angewandte Chemie International Edition)

   null (Ed.)

   We report a novel glycan array architecture that binds the mannose-specific glycan binding protein, concanavalin A (ConA), with sub-femtomolar avidity. A new radical photopolymerization developed specifically for this application combines the grafted-from thiol- (meth)acrylate polymerization with thiol-ene chemistry to graft glycans to the growing polymer brushes. The propagation of the brushes was studied by carrying out this grafted-to/grafted-from radical photopolymerization (GTGFRP) at >400 different conditions using hypersurface photolithography, a printing strategy that substantially accelerates reaction discovery and optimization on surfaces. The effect of brush height and the grafting density of mannosides on the binding of ConA to the brushes was studied systematically, and we found that multivalent and cooperative binding account for the unprecedented sensitivity of the GTGFRP brushes. This study further demonstrates the ease with which new chemistry can be tailored for an application as a result of the advantages of hypersurface photolithography. 

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3. Soft hybrid elastomers containing polymer grafted nanoparticles

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.giant.2022.100133  

   Sevening, Jensen N.; Dottin, Siyana; Torres, Vincent M.; Hickey, Robert J. (December 2022, Giant)
4. Orientational phase behavior of polymer-grafted nanocubes

   https://doi.org/10.1039/c9nr04859f  

   Lee, Brian Hyun-jong; Arya, Gaurav (August 2019, Nanoscale)

   Surface functionalization of nanoparticles with polymer grafts was recently shown to be a viable strategy for controlling the relative orientation of shaped nanoparticles in their higher-order assemblies. In this study, we investigated in silico the orientational phase behavior of coplanar polymer-grafted nanocubes confined in a thin film. We first used Monte Carlo simulations to compute the two-particle interaction free-energy landscape of the nanocubes and identify their globally stable configurations. The nanocubes were found to exhibit four stable phases: those with edge–edge and face–face orientations, and those exhibiting partially overlapped slanted and parallel faces previously assumed to be metastable. Moreover, the edge–edge configuration originally thought to involve kissing edges instead displayed partly overlapping edges, where the extent of the overlap depends on the attachment positions of the grafts. We next formulated analytical scaling expressions for the free energies of the identified configurations, which were used for constructing a comprehensive phase diagram of nanocube orientation in a multidimensional parameter space comprising of the size and interaction strength of the nanocubes and the Kuhn length and surface density of the grafts. The morphology of the phase diagram was shown to arise from an interplay between polymer- and surface-mediated interactions, especially differences in their scalings with respect to nanocube size and grafting density across the four phases. The phase diagram provided insights into tuning these interactions through the various parameters of the system for achieving target configurations. Overall, this work provides a framework for predicting and engineering interparticle configurations, with possible applications in plasmonic nanocomposites where control over particle orientation is critical. 

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5. Reinforcement of polychloroprene by grafted silica nanoparticles

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polymer.2019.03.031  

   Abbas, Zaid M.; Tawfilas, Massimo; Khani, Mohammed M.; Golian, Karl; Marsh, Zachary M.; Jhalaria, Mayank; Simonutti, Roberto; Stefik, Morgan; Kumar, Sanat K.; Benicewicz, Brian C. (May 2019, Polymer)