Nucleobase-Tackified Renewable Plant Oil-Based Supramolecular Adhesives with Robust Properties both under Ambient Conditions and Underwater

Abstract The development of sustainable functional materials derived from natural biomass is attracting tremendous attention from both academic and industrial fields in recent years. Besides renewability, sustainable polymeric materials are highly expected to outperform fossil fuel-derived analogues, showing the excellent application potentials. In this work, a renewable plant-oil based polymer was synthesized and its copolymers tackified by adenine/thymine-containing monomers could act as pressure sensitive adhesives (PSAs) with good performance attained. The PSAs containing adenine moieties had better adhesive properties compared with thymine-containing copolymers with the same molar ratio of comonomers, on account of its strong π-π stacking of purines. In addition, the supramolecular mixtures with complementary nucleobases could form intermolecular H-bonding interaction, having both enhanced peel and shear strengths over ones with individual nucleobases. The renewable plant oil-based PSAs showed outstanding reusability and robust adhesion to various substrates. More importantly, the long alkyl chains from the plant oil moieties also impart the adhesives with good hydrophobicity, which enables us to use the adhesives in the presence of water or even under water. This work highlights that the utilization of bio-inspired supramolecular interactions provides us with a straightforward and viable strategy for fabricating high performance biomass-based polymeric materials.