{
  "id": "automation-assisted-photo-atrp",
  "type": "publication",
  "status": "published",
  "title": "Automation-Assisted Photoinduced Atom Transfer Radical Polymerization",
  "authors": [
    "Cesar Ramirez",
    "Eman Ahmed",
    "Elena Di Mare",
    "Maria Pineiro-Goncalves",
    "Apostolos Maroulis",
    "Prajakatta Mulay",
    "D. Christopher Radford",
    "Adam J. Gormley"
  ],
  "authorPosition": "contributing",
  "publicationType": "Research article",
  "year": "2026",
  "date": "2026-02-11",
  "venue": "ACS Polymers Au",
  "volume": "6",
  "issue": "1",
  "pages": "181-193",
  "doi": "10.1021/acspolymersau.5c00067",
  "doiUrl": "https://doi.org/10.1021/acspolymersau.5c00067",
  "pmid": "41693847",
  "pmcid": "PMC12903423",
  "openAccessUrl": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12903423/",
  "citationCount": "10",
  "keywords": [
    "ATRP",
    "photo-ATRP",
    "laboratory automation",
    "high-throughput polymer synthesis",
    "oxygen tolerance",
    "reversible-deactivation radical polymerization"
  ],
  "summary": "ATRP is one of the workhorse reactions for making polymers with controlled length and composition, but it has historically needed inert, oxygen-free conditions, which rules out running it in an open well plate on a robot. Oxygen-tolerant chemistry removes that constraint. This paper puts photo-ATRP onto an automated liquid-handling platform and uses it to screen reaction components at a scale that is impractical by hand, including for methyl methacrylate, a monomer that propagates slowly enough to be genuinely awkward to optimise.",
  "url": "https://emanahmed.org/publications/automation-assisted-photo-atrp.html",
  "apiUrl": "https://emanahmed.org/api/publications/automation-assisted-photo-atrp.json",
  "abstract": "Oxygen-tolerant reversible-deactivation radical polymerizations (RDRP) now allow many of these reactions to proceed in open labware, such as well plates. This enables the high-throughput synthesis of tailored polymers and lowers the knowledge barrier required to obtain these materials. Building on our previous work automating photoinduced electron/energy transfer reversible addition–fragmentation chain transfer (PET–RAFT) and enzyme-assisted RAFT (Enz-RAFT) polymerization, we now introduce automated atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP). Here, we demonstrate the potential of this platform for the high-throughput optimization of ATRP chemistry. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this workflow can help provide insights into the selection of reaction components, such as ligands and initiators, for the polymerization of kinetically difficult monomers such as methyl methacrylate with smaller rates of propagation than acrylates. This coupling paves the way for data-driven optimization of ATRP reactions, accelerated by the generation of high-throughput data sets. To facilitate the integration of robotics for high-throughput applications in polymer synthesis and optimization of photo-ATRP, we have made a Python package available to assist with experimental planning.",
  "describedBy": "https://emanahmed.org/openapi.json",
  "citations": {
    "bibtex": "@article{ahmed2026automation,\n  title   = {Automation-Assisted Photoinduced Atom Transfer Radical Polymerization},\n  author  = {Ramirez, Cesar and Ahmed, Eman and Mare, Elena Di and Pineiro-Goncalves, Maria and Maroulis, Apostolos and Mulay, Prajakatta and Radford, D. Christopher and Gormley, Adam J.},\n  journal = {ACS Polymers Au},\n  volume  = {6},\n  number  = {1},\n  pages   = {181-193},\n  year    = {2026},\n  doi     = {10.1021/acspolymersau.5c00067}\n}",
    "apa": "Ramirez, C., Ahmed, E., Mare, E. D., Pineiro-Goncalves, M., Maroulis, A., Mulay, P., Radford, D. C. & Gormley, A. J. (2026). Automation-Assisted Photoinduced Atom Transfer Radical Polymerization. ACS Polymers Au, 6(1), 181-193. https://doi.org/10.1021/acspolymersau.5c00067"
  },
  "license": {
    "content": "CC-BY-4.0",
    "contentUrl": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
    "note": "Site prose and this API's metadata may be reused with attribution to Eman Ahmed (emanahmed.org). Published abstracts are reproduced from the publisher of record named in each record's `doi`; their reuse is governed by that publisher, not by this licence.",
    "attribution": "Eman Ahmed, https://emanahmed.org"
  },
  "provenance": {
    "source": "Generated from the site's single source of truth at build time. Bibliographic fields were taken from the publisher of record or PubMed Central, not from memory.",
    "citationMetricsAsOf": "September 2026",
    "canonical": "https://emanahmed.org/"
  }
}