Clickable Poly(2‐Oxazoline)s as Versatile Building Blocks

Abstract Cationic ring‐opening polymerization techniques are very sensitive to nucleophiles, which make it difficult to introduce different functional groups into these polymers. Clickable poly(2‐oxazoline)s were synthesized and functionalization was performed by the copper(I)‐catalyzed 1,3‐dipolar cycloaddition between alkynes and azides. Therefore, an alkyne function is introduced into the polymer backbone by utilizing alkyne toluene‐4‐sulfonates as an initiator. The polymerization kinetics were investigated for four different 2‐substituted‐2‐oxazolines and well‐defined acetylene‐functionalized poly(2‐ethyl‐2‐oxazoline)s with different lengths were synthesized having ≈100% functionality. One of these polymers was used to demonstrate its applicability in the azide‐alkyne click reaction by reaction with different azide compounds. magnified image