- St. Amant, Andre H;
- Discekici, Emre H;
- Bailey, Sophia J;
- Zayas, Manuel S;
- Song, Jung-Ah;
- Shankel, Shelby L;
- Nguyen, Shay N;
- Bates, Morgan W;
- Anastasaki, Athina;
- Hawker, Craig J;
- de Alaniz, Javier Read
Herein, we report the development of a scalable and synthetically robust building block based on norbornadiene (NBD) that can be broadly incorporated into a variety of macromolecular architectures using traditional living polymerization techniques. By taking advantage of a selective and rapid deprotection with tetrazine, highly reactive "masked" cyclopentadiene (Cp) functionalities can be introduced into synthetic polymers as chain-end groups in a quantitative and efficient manner. The orthogonality of this platform further enables a cascade "click" process where the "unmasked" Cp can rapidly react with dienophiles, such as maleimides, through a conventional Diels-Alder reaction. Coupling proceeds with quantitative conversions allowing high molecular weight star and dendritic block copolymers to be prepared in a single step under ambient conditions.