Organic Chemistry Seminar

Alkynes and cycloalkenes are highly versatile functional groups in organic and polymer chemistry and many synthetic methods are out there for us to use. In particular, olefin metathesis provides a versatile synthetic method to produce small, medium and large molecules. Over the past two decades, wide ranges of the molecules have been prepared by various types of olefin metathesis, such as cross metathesis (CM), ring-closing metathesis (RCM), ring-opening metathesis (ROM) reactions. For polymerization, simple polymerization using one of three mechanisms has been a dominant method to produce polymers with rather simple structures. This is because combining more than two different methods into one polymerization fails to give polymers with well-defined structures due to lack of selectivity or control. Here, we describe new polymerization strategy or concept called cascade polymerization using various cycloalkenes and alkynes. This presentation, we will demonstrate our recent efforts for developing this new idea of polymerization method and how we can expand this to various new polymer architectures prepared by cascade reactions. Furthermore, living polymerization is also possible to produce various block copolymers. Lastly, we finish it with cascade polymerization of sugar-based monomers where the resulting polymers were also fully degradable to small molecules.