Self-assembly of carbohydrate-based block copolymer systems: glyconanoparticles and highly nanostructured thin films

Carbohydrates constitute a sustainable source of materials that has attracted growing interest due to their “green” aspects, biocompatibility, biodegradability and biorecognition properties. Their industrial applications at the macroscopic scale offer new solutions for biobased materials, and they have been applied in different sectors, such as cosmetics, health, packaging, or microelectronics. To gain more understanding and incorporate these systems into new challenges/applications and devices (e.g., bionanoelectronics) in response to the transition to a biobased economy, it is of great importance to control their self-assembly at the nanoscale. This has been the aim of our work during the past decade—we have used “click chemistry” and developed a new class of linear carbohydrate-based (so-called high χ) diblock copolymer systems resulting, via self-assembly, in highly nanostructured sub-10-nm-resolution thin films. In this focused review, we summarize some recent work illustrating the self-assembly properties leading to the design of glyconanoparticles and highly nanostructured thin films potentially of great importance in different applications and biomarkers.