Genetic Engineering of Polymers

Abstract

Polymers are long chain molecules of repetitive sequence that are widely used as plastics, rubbers, fibers, adhesives, biomaterials, and composite materials. Genetic engineering is now being used to create protein-based polymers related to silks, elastins, collagens, adhesive proteins, viral spike proteins, and coiled-coil proteins. At the same time, protein polymers that bear no direct relation to any naturally occurring proteins are being designed and expressed in microbial hosts. The precise control of macromolecular architecture provided by the protein biosynthetic apparatus raises the prospect of new classes of genetically engineered polymers for high performance materials applications.

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