Hydrolases in Polymer Chemistry: Chemoenzymatic Approaches to Polymeric Materials - Enzymatic Polymerisation - page 83

Scheme 1 Synthesis of diacrylated poly(pentadecalactone) [ 8 ]

Fig. 3 Chemoenzymatic routes to crosslinked macrolactones. Left : enzymatic polymerization of

α -methylenemacrolides and subsequent vinyl polymerization [ 10 ]. Right : Enzymatically synthe-

sized highly crystalline poly(ambrettolide) before and after thermal crosslinking [ 11 ]

2.2 Copolymers

The synthesis of acrylates from sugars and other substrates has been applied in the
early phases of enzymatic reactions and has already been reviewed [ 2 , 14 ]. The
method is attractive because the enzyme allows for mild and, in some examples,
stereoselective acrylation. A recent example was published by Popescu et al. who
took advantage of the frequent transesterification reactions and reported a route
to highly functional linear copoly(meth)acrylates [ 15 ]. Methyl (meth)acrylate was
mixed with various functional alcohols in the presence of Novozym 435. In situ