Genetic Engineering of Molecular and Supramolecular Structure in Polymers

The development of new advanced materials with useful optical, electronic and mass transport properties will require increasingly precise control of solid state organization at the supramolecular level. Polymeric materials offer special advantages in this regard as a result of their characteristic extended molecular connectivity, which limits the number of possible configurations of the system. On the other hand, polymeric materials suffer from the statistical nature of the processes used to prepare them, and from the associated heterogeneity in their molecular structures. New methods of synthesis that afford homogeneous populations of chains will offer important advantages in the control of supramolecular organization. At present, biological polymerization processes provide the only clear route to polymeric materials characterized by uniformity of chain length, sequence and stereochemistry. With the advent of two related technologies (gene synthesis and recombinant DNA), it has become possible to imagine the exploitation of biological polymerizations - and protein biosynthesis in particular - to prcxiuce new materials of predictable and desirable properties. We describe herein our own first steps toward this objective.