Final Report Summary - DUPLEX (Programmable Plastics)
Nucleic acids encode information in the sequence of monomer units, and this structure provided the molecular basis for the evolution of biological life. The information is read through sequence-selective duplex formation and copied through template synthesis. The sequence of monomer units also defines the three-dimensional structures and functional properties of single-stranded nucleic acids. There is no fundamental reason that these properties should be restricted to biological polymers. In this project, we have shown that any synthetic polymer equipped with complementary recognition units has the potential to show sequence-selective duplex formation and the associated properties found in nucleic acids. We have developed a blueprint that provides the design rules for the construction of such molecules and demonstrated the viability in a large number of different molecular systems that bear no resemblance to their biological counterparts. Synthetic polymers with information encoded in the sequence of different monomer building blocks have been prepared. We have shown that this sequence information can be read by complementary polymer chains, which leads to the formation of duplexes that resemble the DNA duplex. In very recent experiments, we have also shown that is possible to copy this sequence information from a parent polymer chain to a daughter strand. This process is a chemical equivalent of biology’s PCR (polymerase chain reaction) that allows one polymer chain to serve as a template for the synthesis of new polymer chains. The sequence of the product polymer is defined by the sequence of the starting template. This discovery opens up exciting new opportunities in the use of evolution to explore the properties of this new class of synthetic information molecules.