Sequence-controlled polymers: bridging the gap between biotic and abiotic macromolecules

Over the last decades, synthetic polymers and biological macromolecules have been studied by different scientific communities. Man-made plastics are obtained by simple one-pot polymerization methods and exhibit therefore non-uniform molecular structures. Consequently, molecular polydispersity shall be taken into account in synthetic polymer chemistry and physics. In contrast, biopolymers are produced by precisely-controlled biosynthesis and have perfectly-defined molecular structures. Thus, they exhibit folding and organization properties that are difficult to attain with conventional synthetic materials. Hence, biochemistry and biophysics are disciplines on their own. Yet, in the last few years, the traditional boundaries between biological and non-biological polymers tend to disappear. Due to recent progress in synthetic polymer chemistry, it is today possible to synthesize a wide variety of uniform synthetic polymers. In particular, significant advances have been reported for the synthesis of sequence-controlled polymers, which are man-made macromolecules with perfectly-controlled primary structures. This new class of synthetic polymers open up unprecedented possibilities for tuning structure/property relationships. However, the physical chemistry of these novel materials has been barely investigated to date. In this talk, I will highlight recent approaches developped in my laboratory for the synthesis of uniform sequence-defined polymers. Particular emphasis will be put on the design of abiotic information-containing macromolecules, which are new functional polymers inspired by nucleic acids.