The non-equilibrium self-assembly of amphiphilic block copolymers driven by a pH oscillator

Abstract Realizing and investigating artificial an non-equilibrium self-assembly is one of the challenging but attractive fields in supramolecular chemistry, because most molecular self-assembly in living organisms are out of thermodynamic equilibrium. In this article, we achieved the non-equilibrium self-assembly of amphiphilic block copolymers that contained polyethylene glycol segment and polyacrylic acid segment (PEG-PAAs) by coupling them with a pH oscillator. The self-assembly of PEG-PAAs varied dynamically and periodically in the pH oscillator. Furthermore, we found that the self-assembly of PEG-PAAs can bring additional influence on the dynamics of the pH oscillator. This line of work not only demonstrates the interrelationship between chemical oscillators and self-assembly of amphiphilic copolymers, but also contributes to develop chemical oscillators into a general driving force to realize and investigate non-equilibrium self-assembly of stimuli-responsive building blocks, and promotes the study of molecular self-assembly one step forward from static self-assembly under thermodynamic equilibrium to a dissipative system like living organisms.