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Direct link www.colloid.ch/dendrimers Since their synthesis by Vögtle and Tomalia in the eighties, dendrimers have developed into an very interesting class of novel polymeric materials. Potential applications include surface patterning, synthesis of nanoparticles, or gene delivery. Our research group was much involved in the study of adsorption of cationic dendrimers to negatively charged solid substrates, mainly silica, mica, or sulfate latex particles. This essay presents a summary of these results. Polyamidoamine (PAMAM) dendrimers Dendrimers to be discussed are the commercially available polyamidoamine (PAMAM) den-drimers. Their chemical structure and architecture are illustrated in the figure below. They are synthesized in different generations, and each generation adds a corona of branching side groups. PAMAM dendrimers are available up to generation 10 (G10). The G10 dendrimer has a molecular mass of 935 kg/mol and radius in solution of about 7 nm. The dependence of their ra-dius a can be described by the simple relation 4πa3/3 = vM/φ where v is the molecular volume of the monomer unit, M the molecular mass, and φ the volume fraction of the polymer. This relation assumes that the dendrimer can be approximated by a porous sphere containing water. In th