(559e) Optical Sequencing of Single Synthetic Polymers in Liquid

Microscopic sequences of synthetic polymers play crucial roles in their properties, but are generally unknown and inaccessible to traditional measurements. Here we report real-time optical sequencing of single synthetic copolymer chains under living polymerization conditions. We achieve so by multi-color imaging of polymer growth by single catalysts at single-monomer resolution through CREATS (coupled reaction approach toward super-resolution-imaging). CREATS converts a reaction effectively fluorogenic, enabling single-molecule localization microscopy of chemical reactions at higher reactant concentrations. We find that the chain propagation kinetics of surface-grafted polymerization shows temporal dynamics and chain-length dependence, attributable to neighboring monomer interactions and surface electrostatic effects, respectively. Moreover, the microscopic sequences of individual copolymers reveal and quantify their tendency of forming block copolymers. Such sequencing capability paves the way for single-chain level structure-function correlation studies of synthetic polymers.