Table 1.

Physical properties of copolymers.

	coPMLA-Me25H75	coPMLA-Me50H50
Methylation(a) (%)	20.2	46.5
Mw (b)	32,600	33,100
Mn (b)	26,100	24,300
Tm (c) (°C)	174	172
Td (d) (°C)	186	198
Microstructure(e)
Contiguous patches nf Me	3.9	11.8
Contiguous patches ng COOH	11.5	14.5
R	0.3	0.2

^(a)Copolymer composition determined by ¹H NMR;

^(b)Weight- and number-average molecular weight measured by sec-HPLC;

^(c)Melting temperature measured by differential scanning calorimetry;

^(d)Onset decomposition temperature measured at 5% of loss of initial weight;

^(e)n^f and n^g refer to averaged numbers of methylated and free carboxyl group within homogeneous sequences, respectively, and (R) refers the randomness determined by ¹³C NMR analysis [11].