New mild amphoteric sulfohydroxybetaine-type surfactants containing different labile spacers: Synthesis, surface properties and performance.

Hypothesis: The excellent performance of zwitterionic alkylamide-type surfactants may be tuned by slight modifications of their structures, especially concerning linking groups between hydrophilic and hydrophobic moieties and the moderation of strong NH hydrogen bonds via the introduction of a methyl group attached to the nitrogen.

Experiments: The influence of the structure of alkylamidehydroxysulfobetaine-type surfactants on their adsorption and micellization, lime soap dispersing ability, wettability, as well as antimicrobial and hemolytic activities was studied in this work. We synthesized a series of novel surfactants with labile CON(Me)CH or CHN(Me) CO spacers that were adjacent to the hydrophobic tail CH and separated from the zwitterionic hydroxysulfobetaine headgroup by CH or CH linkers, i.