Biopolymers polyacetylenes

To our mind, except for bivalent biopolymers, the terminally functionalyzed conformational-rigid molecules such as polyphenylenes, polyacetylenes, perfluoroalkyls etc. seem to be promising spacers for this procedure. 

This chapter presents some examples of the application of the ab initio crystal-orbital method described in Chapter 1. Though these applications range from the field of plastics (polyethylene and its fluoro derivatives) through highly conducting polymers [polyacetylenes and polydiacetylenes, (SN) c, TCNQ and TTF stacks] to biopolymers (homopolynucleotides and homopolypeptides), they are only illustrative. No attempt has been made to review the numerous other applications performed by the Namur group and by other researchers, as this would increase unduly the size of this book. 

Biopolymers, like nucleic acids (DNA and RNA), proteins, polysaccharides, lipids, and so on. have fundamental significance in life processes. Since the mid-1980s, highly conducting polymers, like doped different polyacetylenes (1) and (2) (SN) (3), or the TCNQ-TTF system (4) and (5), with quasi-one-dimensional alternating stacks of the two different types of molecule embedded in a three-dimensional molecular crystal, and PPV (6), have become objects of extensive experimental investigations because they are also candidates for the discovery of new physical phenomena, such as solitons, polarons and bipolarons, and superconductivity with higher transition temperatures (T ). 

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