Polymersomes hydrophilic brush scaling relations

We report the combination of synchrotron small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) to characterise the PEO brush length on PEO-PBO copolymer vesicles as a function of the PEO polymerisation degree. We observed that PEO chains scale with the polymerisation degree according a fully stretched regime consistent with brush theories. The same measurements have also allowed us to calculate the numbers of water molecules per PEO chain showing that on average three molecules are associated with each monomer in a PEO chain.