Among different possible grafting procedures, a ‘grafting from’
approach is used in the present study, where the polymerization
is initiated from the surface of XG and the PLLA chains grow by
addition of monomers. Ring-opening polymerization (ROP) is a
technique used for the polymerization of cyclic monomers and has
been successfully used for grafting PLLA chains onto cellulose surfaces (Lonnberg et al., 2006; Yuan, Yuan, Zhang, & Xie, 2007). The
present study will focus on the use of a ROP technique to graft
PLLA chains from XG. The study will investigate different polymerization conditions and effects from the XG substrate structure. To
our best knowledge, this type of approach has not previously been
used to prepare a high molar mass graft copolymer compatibilizer
for PLLA. The advantage is that the polysaccharide may physically
adsorb to the cellulose surface, similarly to XG/cellulose interfaces
in the native state in the primary cell wall of plants