Tuning Reactivity of Micellar Nanoreactors by Precise Adjustments of the Amphiphiles and Substrates Hydrophobicity

Polymeric assemblies, such as micelles, are gaining increasing attention due to their ability to serve as nanoreactors for the execution of organic reactions in aqueous media. The ability to conduct transformations, which have been limited to organic media, in water is essential for the further development of the important fields of greencatalysis and bioorthogonal chemistry, among other fields. In light of the recent progress in the expanding the scopes of reactions that can be conducted using nanoreactors, we aimed to gain deeper understanding of the roles of the hydrophobicity of both the core of micellar nanoreactors and the substrates on the reaction rates in water. Towards this goal we designed a set of metal-loaded micelles, composed of PEG-dendron amphiphiles and studied their ability to serve as nanoreactors for a palladium mediated depropargylation reaction of four substrates with different LogP values. Using dendrons as the hydrophobic block, allowed us to fine tune the lipophilicity of the dendritic end-groups and study how precise structural changes in the hydrophobicity of the amphiphiles affect the reaction rates. The kinetic data revealed linear relations between the rate constants and the hydrophobicity of the amphiphiles (estimated by the dendron’scLogP), while exponential dependence was obtained for the lipophilicity of the substrates (estimated by their LogP values). Our results demonstrate the vital contributions of the hydrophobicity of both the substrates and amphiphiles on the lipo-selectivity of nanoreactors, illustrating the potential of tuning hydrophobicity as a tool for optimizingthe reactivity and selectivity of nanoreactors.