Bottlebrushes are densely grafted polymers

with properties distinctly different from those of sparsely grafted or linear polymers. Bulky side chains are packed around the backbone

and the steric effect between neighboring side chains forces the backbone to adopt a stretched conformation. Besides

compared with normal linear polymers

molecular weights of bottlebrushes can reach 10

6

g/mol easily. And bottlebrushes can form nanometer structures of tens to hundreds of nanometers with a wide range of applications. Currently

researches working on bottlebrushes are mainly focused on synthesizing bottlebrushes of well-defined chemical structures

their physical structures

properties

and applications based on bottlebrushes with coil main chains and coil side chains. Here

this review covers the synthetic approaches towards bottlebrushes with well-defined structures

recent advances in bottlebrushes with rod side chains or rod backbones

and properties and applications of bottlebrushes.