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Related Concept Videos

Polymers02:34

Polymers

The word polymer is derived from the Greek words “poly” which means “many” and “mer” which means “parts”. Polymers are long chains of molecules composed of repeating units of smaller molecules, known as monomers. They either occur naturally, such as DNA and proteins, or can be constructed synthetically, like plastics. They have varied structural characteristics, such as linear chains, branched chains, or complex networks, that contribute to the properties that they exhibit. Additionally,...
Polymers02:34

Polymers

The word polymer is derived from the Greek words “poly” which means “many” and “mer” which means “parts”. Polymers are long chains of molecules composed of repeating units of smaller molecules, known as monomers. They either occur naturally, such as DNA and proteins, or can be constructed synthetically, like plastics. They have varied structural characteristics, such as linear chains, branched chains, or complex networks, that contribute to the properties that they exhibit. Additionally,...
Polymers02:34

Polymers

The word polymer is derived from the Greek words “poly” which means “many” and “mer” which means “parts”. Polymers are long chains of molecules composed of repeating units of smaller molecules, known as monomers. They either occur naturally, such as DNA and proteins, or can be constructed synthetically, like plastics. They have varied structural characteristics, such as linear chains, branched chains, or complex networks, that contribute to the properties that they exhibit. Additionally,...
Polymers: Defining Molecular Weight01:01

Polymers: Defining Molecular Weight

Unlike small molecules with definite molecular weights, polymers are a mixture of individual polymer chains of varying lengths, each with a unique molecular weight. So, the molecular weight of a polymer is expressed as an average value based on the average size of the polymer chains. The two most common forms of averages used for polymers are the number average molecular weight and weight average molecular weight.
The number average molecular weight (Mn) is the summation of the number...
Step-Growth Polymerization: Overview01:03

Step-Growth Polymerization: Overview

Step-growth or condensation polymerization is a stepwise reaction of bi or multifunctional monomers to form long-chain polymers. As all the monomers are reactive, most of the monomers are consumed at the early stages of the reaction to form small chains of reactive oligomers, which then combine to form long polymer chains in the late stages. Hence, the reaction has to proceed for a long time to achieve high molecular weight polymers.
Many natural and synthetic polymers are produced by...
Radical Chain-Growth Polymerization: Overview01:10

Radical Chain-Growth Polymerization: Overview

Chain-growth or addition polymerization is successive addition reactions of monomers with a polymer chain. In radical chain-growth polymerization, the reaction proceeds via a free-radical intermediate. The free radical is formed from radical initiators, which spontaneously generate free radicals by homolytic fission. Organic peroxides (such as dibenzoyl peroxide, as shown in Figure 1) or azo compounds are popular radical initiators. A low concentration ratio of radical initiator to monomer is...

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Polymer Microarrays for High Throughput Discovery of Biomaterials
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Polymer Microarrays for High Throughput Discovery of Biomaterials

Published on: January 25, 2012

Casting polymer nets to optimize noisy molecular codes.

Tsvi Tlusty1

  • 1Department of Physics of Complex Systems, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel. tsvi.tlusty@weizmann.ac.il

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
|June 14, 2008
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Life

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Area of Science:

  • Molecular biology
  • Statistical mechanics
  • Information theory

Background:

  • Life depends on molecular codes for information transfer, which are susceptible to errors during molecular recognition.
  • Understanding how these codes evolve to minimize errors is crucial for comprehending biological systems.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate how molecular codes can be optimized to resist noise from molecular recognition.
  • To model the trade-off between the cost and quality of noisy molecular codes.

Main Methods:

  • Utilized statistical mechanics of two-dimensional polymer networks to model molecular code optimization.
  • Defined 'polymers' as boundaries between symbol regions in the code.
  • Analyzed the statistics of these polymer networks to determine code cost and quality.

Main Results:

  • The statistics of the polymer network directly influence the cost-quality balance of the molecular code.
  • A phase transition was observed in the polymer network as cost-quality parameters were varied.
  • This transition led to a discontinuous increase in the number of encoded meanings.

Conclusions:

  • The study provides a statistical mechanics framework for understanding molecular code evolution and optimization.
  • The findings suggest that changes in physical parameters can lead to significant increases in coding capacity.
  • Population dynamics play a role in the evolutionary trajectory of these molecular codes.