Polymer chemist's perspective on protein science and engineering

Abstract

Synthetic polymers and proteins share the essential characteristic of long-chain mol. architecture. But they differ in important ways; proteins are uniform, often well folded, and evolvable, whereas polymers are heterogeneous and adopt random-coil or partially ordered conformations. This lecture will describe an ongoing attempt to bridge the gap between polymers and proteins by using artificial genes to direct the synthesis of artificial proteins, and by designing new amino acids that can be used in cellular protein synthesis. These developments have provided a basis for new approaches to macromol. design, biol. imaging, and mol.-level anal. of cellular processes.