Hydrogen bonding modules for use in supramolecular polymers

Supramolecular polymer chemistry has emerged as a major research focus within polymer science, because of the potential to improve material properties, through the combination of noncovalent interactions and synthetic polymers. As a supramolecular handle, the most useful noncovalent interaction is hydrogen bonding, which has been used extensively, because of advantages such as synthetic accessibility, directionality, fidelity, and, most importantly, responsiveness to external stimuli. This review introduces recent advances in the development of hydrogen bonding modules that can be useful for creating a variety of supramolecular polymers. Furthermore, we present selected examples of hydrogen bonded supramolecular polymers from the literature, by dividing them into three categories: supramolecular polymers assembled from small molecules, and main-chain and side-chain supramolecular polymers.