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Abstract
This paper reviews the research work on the liquid crystalline (LC) polymer vesicles (polymersomes), where the thermotropic nematic and smectic phases are displayed in the lyotropic bilayer polymer membrane. LC polymersomes possess the properties of both liquid crystals and polymers, the two essential soft matters. LC polymersomes offer, on the one hand, novel examples of the interplay between orientational order and the curved geometry of a two-dimensional membrane. Spherical, ellipsoidal and tetrahedral vesicles are discussed. On the other hand, LC polymersomes enable novel design of stimuli-responsive polymersomes using intramolecular conformational change at nematic to isotropic phase transition of LC blocks. Photo-responsive polymersome bursting is highlighted.
Acknowledgements
We thank Jing Yang (BUCT, Beijing China) for her contribution to the polymer synthesis. We thank Daniel Lévy and Aurélie Di Cicco (Institut Curie, Paris) for their help in TEM imaging. We thank Marianne Imperor for her help in SAXS at SOLEIL (LPS, Orsay).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Lin Jia
Lin Jia received his BS in 2002 and his MS in 2005 in organic chemistry from Northwest University in Xi’an, China. He obtained his PhD in 2008 in polymer chemistry from Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China. He was awarded the post-doctoral fellowship of the ‘Fondation Pierre-Gilles de Gennes pour la Recherche’ in 2008 and worked with Min-Hui Li on polymer self-assemblies in the Institut Curie (2008–2011). He is actually a post-doctoral associate in the University of Toronto working with Mitchell Winnik.
Min-Hui Li
Min-Hui Li received her BS in 1986 and her MS in 1989 from the Department of Chemical Engineering of Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. She obtained her PhD in 1993 in polymer chemistry and physical chemistry from the Pierre & Marie Curie University (UPMC) in Paris, working with Jean-Pierre Cotton at the Laboratoire Leon Brillouin in the Commissariat à l‘Energie Atomique (CEA). She joined the French CNRS in 1994 as a tenure research scientist at the Centre de Recherche Paul Pascal in Bordeaux. She moved to the Institut Curie in Paris in 1997, and has been a research director (CNRS) since 2011. Her research interests include chiral liquid crystals, liquid crystalline polymers and elastomers, soft matter actuators and stimuli-responsive polymer materials. More recently her interests focus on polymer self-assembly and nanotechnology for drug delivery and biomedical imaging.