In the context of the defossilisation of the chemical industry, our team has been investigating the incorporation of monosaccharides into synthetic polymer backbones. The goal of this research is to create renewable materials with attractive sustainability attributes (e.g., degradability, chemical recyclability), and which are tuneable thanks to the functionalisation potential of sugar moieties. This talk will present our recent work on the development of monomers from pentose sugars such as xylose, as well as from deoxyribonucleosides, and their polymerisation using techniques such as ring-opening co-polymerisation (ROCOP) [1], acyclic metathesis polymerisation (ADMET) [2], or thiol-ene polymerisation [3]. The derivatisation of xylose with potassium thiocyanate will also be introduced as a versatile synthetic handle to further fine-tune polymer properties [4]. Finally, some preliminary results around the applications of those synthetic carbohydrate polymers will be shown, including as solid polymer electrolytes, and pharmaceutical amorphous solid dispersions [5].
