Hydrophobic Covalent Patterns on Cellulose Paper through Photothiol-X Ligations

In the current study, we introduce photothiol-X chemistry as a powerful method to create hydrophobic patterns covalently grafted to the surface of cellulose paper. The general strategy builds on the use of a cellulose-based molecular printboard featuring disulfide functions which upon spatiocontrolled light irradiation at 365 nm allows robust photothiol-X ligations with hydrophobic moieties. A screening of structurally diverse molecular architectures as hydrophobic coating was conducted, and the most impressive result obtained with cholesterol moieties allows the creation of spatially well-resolved hydrophobic patterns with a contact angle of 140.8°. Our discoveries are supported by in-depth characterization studies using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, X-ray photoelectron spectrometry, and scanning electron microscopy analyses.