Macromolecular design of poly(vinyl alcohol) by RAFT polymerization

Reversible Addition–Fragmentation chain Transfer polymerization (RAFT) is employed herein to obtain the first example of poly(vinyl alcohol), PVA, with controlled molecular weight and terminal aminegroups thus presenting a flexible tool for materials design and bioconjugation. Furthermore, we demonstrate that RAFT control can be used to facilitate syndiotactic chain propagation and obtain PVA with the highest reported content of syndiotactic dyad (∼78%).