Bottom-up Preparation of Phase-Separated Polymersomes.

We present a bottom-up approach to fabricating monodisperse, two-component polymersomes that possess phase-separated ("patchy") chemical topology. We compare our approach with already-existing top-down preparation methods for patchy polymer vesicles, such as film rehydration. Our findings demonstrate a bottom-up, solvent-switch self-assembly approach that produces a high yield of nanoparticles of the target size, morphology, and surface topology for drug delivery applications, in this case patchy polymersomes of a diameter of approximately 50 nm. In addition, we present an image processing algorithm to automatically calculate polymersome size distributions from TEM images based on a series of pre-processing steps, image segmentation, and round object identification. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.