Recent progress in the construction of polymers with advanced chain structures via hybrid, switchable, and cascade chain-growth polymerizations

The construction of artificial polymers with a comparative degree of structural and compositional diversity/complexity similar to the biomacromolecules created by nature is a great challenge, especially for those prepared by chain-growth polymerizations. Since the development of some novel catalysts and polymerization technologies in the past decade, one-pot chain-growth polymerization strategies have been developed to polymerize structurally distinct monomers, as a result, producing block, multiblock, random, and gradient chain structures with diverse compositions. In this minireview, the recent progress on the synthesis of polymers with advanced chain structures via chain-growth polymerization has been summarized. The main part of this article is divided into three sections according to the different polymerization strategies: hybrid copolymerization, switchable polymerization, and cascade polymerization. It is anticipated that this minireview will provide a unique view for the fabrication of polymers with a high degree of structural and compositional diversity/complexity.