Polymer chains polypeptides

To be successful in these applications, it is important that materials can self-assemble into precisely defined structures. Peptide-based polymers have many advantages over conventional synthetic polymers since they are able to hierarchically assemble into stable, ordered conformations [4]. Depending on the substituents of the amino acid side chain, polypeptides are able to adopt a multitude of... 

In the synthesis of polypeptides with biological activity on a crosslinked polymer support as pioneered by Merrifield (1 2) a strict control of the amino acid sequence requires that each of the consecutive reactions should go virtually to completion. Thus, for the preparation of a polypeptide with 60 amino acid residues, even an average conversion of 99% would contaminate the product with an unacceptable amount of "defect chains". Yet, it has been observed (13) that with a large excess of an amino acid reagent —Tn the solution reacting with a polymer-bound polypeptide, the reaction kinetics deviate significantly from the expected exponential approach to quantitative conversion, indicating that the reactive sites on the polymer are not equally reactive. 

A less obvious explanation is that the observed residual structure is not due to attractive interactions, but rather to repulsive ones. The steric repulsion between atoms forced to partially overlap is a dominant, if not the dominant, force in all of chemistry. These highly local interactions are known to be important in polymer conformations (Flory, 1969 Ramachandran and Sasisekharan, 1968). For homopolymers or simple alternating polymers, they can often be safely neglected by assuming they confer no net directionality to the chain. Polypeptide chains, however, are chiral and support specific sequences of 20 differently shaped... 

Before discussing details of their model and others, it is useful to review the two main techniques used to infer the characteristics of chain conformation in unordered polypeptides. One line of evidence came from hydrodynamic experiments—viscosity and sedimentation—from which a statistical end-to-end distance could be estimated and compared with values derived from calculations on polymer chain models (Flory, 1969). The second is based on spectroscopic experiments, in particular CD spectroscopy, from which information is obtained about the local chain conformation rather than global properties such as those derived from hydrodynamics. It is entirely possible for a polypeptide chain to adopt some particular local structure while retaining characteristics of random coils derived from hydrodynamic measurements this was pointed out by Krimm and Tiffany (1974). In support of their proposal, Tiffany and Krimm noted the following points ... 

A mean-square helical hydrophobic moment,

, is defined for polypeptides in analogy to the mean-square dipole moment, , for polymer chains. For a freely jointed polymer chain, is given by X rr , where mi denotes the dipole moment associated with bond /. In the absence of any correlations in the hydrophobic moments of individual amino acid residues In the helix,

is specified by X Wj2, where H denotes the hydrophobicity of residue /, Matrix-generation schemes are formulated that permit rapid evaluation of

and . The behaviour of

I

is illustrated by calculations performed for model sequential copolypeptides. 

For more complicated chains such as cellulose derivatives, diene polymers and polypeptides, the factor a may be defined in the more general manner. 

Wool. Wool fibers are comprised mainly of proteins the polypeptide polymers in wool are produced from some 20 alpha-amino acids. The major chemical features of the polypeptide polymer are the amide links, which occur between the amino acids along the polymer chain, and the cystine (sulfur to sulfur) crosslinks, which occur in a random spacing between the polymer chains. The polymer contains many amine, carboxylic acid, and amide groups, which contribute in part to the water-absorbent nature of the fiber. 

All proteins are polymers of amino acids. The polymers, or polypeptides, consist of a sequence of up to 20 different L-a-amino acids (residues). For chains under 40 residues the term peptide is frequently used instead of protein. The term protein is generally used to refer to the complete biological molecule in a stable conformation. 

It is possible to obtain more reliable quantitative information on the conformational and structural characteristics of polymer chains by studying EB in solutions of polypeptides that do not contain ionogenic groups and using non-electrolytic spiralizing systems as solvents ° ... 

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