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Bottom-Up Preparation of Phase-Separated Polymersomes |
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| Authors: | Safa Almadhi Joe Forth Laura Rodriguez-Arco Aroa Duro-Castano Ian Williams Lorena Ruiz-Pérez Giuseppe Battaglia |
| Affiliation: | 1. Department of Chemistry, University College London, London, WC1H 0AJ UK;2. Department of Chemistry, University College London, London, WC1H 0AJ UK Department of Applied Physics, Faculty of Sciences, University of Granada, Granada, 18071 Spain;3. Department of Chemistry, University College London, London, WC1H 0AJ UK Curapath, Valencia, 46980 Spain;4. Department of Chemistry, University College London, London, WC1H 0AJ UK Department of Physics, University of Surrey, Guildford, GU2 7XH UK Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia, The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology, Barcelona, 08028 Spain;5. Department of Chemistry, University College London, London, WC1H 0AJ UK Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia, The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology, Barcelona, 08028 Spain |
| Abstract: | A bottom-up approach to fabricating monodisperse, two-component polymersomes that possess phase-separated (“patchy”) chemical topology is presented. This approach is compared with already-existing top-down preparation methods for patchy polymer vesicles, such as film rehydration. These findings demonstrate a bottom-up, solvent-switch self-assembly approach that produces a high yield of nanoparticles of the target size, morphology, and surface topology for drug delivery applications, in this case patchy polymersomes of a diameter of ≈50 nm. In addition, an image processing algorithm to automatically calculate polymersome size distributions from transmission electron microscope images based on a series of pre-processing steps, image segmentation, and round object identification is presented. |
| Keywords: | drug delivery phase separation polymersomes self-assembly vesicles |