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  • Review Article
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Editing of polymer backbones

Nature Reviews Chemistry volume 7, pages 600–615 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Polymers are at the epicentre of modern technological progress and the associated environmental pollution. Considerations of both polymer functionality and lifecycle are crucial in these contexts, and the polymer backbone — the core of a polymer — is at the root of these considerations. Just as the meaning of a sentence can be altered by editing its words, the function and sustainability of a polymer can also be transformed via the chemical modification of its backbone. Yet, polymer modification has primarily been focused on the polymer periphery. In this Review, we focus on the transformations of the polymer backbone by defining some concepts fundamental to this topic (for example, ‘polymer backbone’ and ‘backbone editing’) and by collecting and categorizing examples of backbone editing scattered throughout a century’s worth of chemical literature, and outline critical directions for further research. In so doing, we lay the foundation for the field of polymer backbone editing and hope to accelerate its development.

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Fig. 1: A timeline of the major contributions to polymer backbone editing.
Fig. 2: Defining polymer backbones and backbone editing through graph representation.
Fig. 3: Key precedents of atom insertions into and deletion from polymer backbones.
Fig. 4: Cycloadditions, side chain cyclizations and multi-cyclization of polymer backbones.
Fig. 5: Chemically and thermally induced de-cyclizations of polymer backbones on multiple substrates.
Fig. 6: Force-induced de-cyclization of mechanophores embedded into polymer backbones.
Fig. 7: Rearrangements of polymer backbones.
Fig. 8: Combinations of elementary backbone edits.

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Acknowledgements

Writing and processing of this manuscript was supported by the Department of Energy under the Early Career Research Program (DE-SC0022898). R.A.J.D. is supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under grant no. DGE-1650116.

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  1. Department of Chemistry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    Rachael A. J. Ditzler, Andrew J. King, Sydney E. Towell, Maxim Ratushnyy & Aleksandr V. Zhukhovitskiy

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Correspondence to Aleksandr V. Zhukhovitskiy.

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Competing interests

A.V.Z. and R.A.J.D. are co-inventors on a Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) patent and provisional US patent covering research discussed in this work, filed through the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (PCT application no. PCT/US22/49090 and US application no. 63/278,283). A.J.K., S.E.T. and M.R. declare no competing interests.

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Ditzler, R.A.J., King, A.J., Towell, S.E. et al. Editing of polymer backbones. Nat Rev Chem 7, 600–615 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41570-023-00514-w

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