Morphological modulation of azobenzene-containing tubular polymersomes

The emergence of smart tubular vesicles has attracted increasing attention in the fields of life science and nanoengineering. Recent preliminary efforts have been put into fabricating kinds of smart tubular vesicles with different morphologies via the self-assembly of amphiphilic azobenzene-containing block copolymers. However, the detailed environmental effects on their self-assembly behaviors in solution remain uncharted. In this work, we carefully investigated several external factors that could influence the morphology formation and the transition of azobenzene-containing tubular vesicles, including the initial polymer concentration, the nature of common solvent, temperature, water addition rate, and irradiation with light of different wavelengths. The result showed that the morphological modulation of these tubular polymersomes was synergistically controlled by these external factors from both thermodynamics and kinetics aspects. This study could be helpful to understand and illustrate the morphology formation and modulation of smart tubular polymersomes.