Self-Functionalizing Polymer Film Surfaces Assisted by Specific Polystyrene End-Tagging

Two simple approaches to build up micropatterned functionalized polymer films are reported here. Both of them are based on the formation of porous films consisting of two-dimensionally ordered void structures, produced by evaporation of a polymer solution in the presence of humidity. In the first approach, we utilize an amino-terminated linear polystyrene to fabricate honeycomb structured films in which the cavities are enriched with amino groups that preserve their chemical reactivity. This allows, in principle, to obtain films with different surface functionality by simply changing the chain-end of the polymer used. In the second approach, we synthesize a luminescent chain-ended polystyrene to show how the honeycomb structures can be easily transformed, by a thermal treatment, into flat micropatterned fluorescent films. Both the microporous and the flat micropatterned films resulting from this study are attractive materials since the chemical functions distributed on their surface can further react with other molecules to provide a more complex array suitable for biological tests.