Poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) microspheres prepared so far did not exhibit discontinuous change in their properties at the lower critical solution temperature of PNIPAM. In order to create novel microspheres which have sharp temperature-responsiveness, we prepared several kinds of microspheres which had different structures of the thermosensitive shell. Among them, the microspheres whose shell was composed of acrylic acid (AAc)-containing hairy PNIPAM met our requirement, that is, incorporation of only 0.02% AAc into hairy PNIPAM shell was found to enable the properties of microspheres such as hydrodynamic size and electrophoretic mobility to change discontinuously at the critical temperature. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.