Water-soluble non-peptide foldamers with tunable higher-order conformations
Friday, October 9, 2015 - 07:30
in Physics & Chemistry
"Foldamers" are a class of synthetic structures modeled after proteins, but are designed to form unique, non-natural tertiary and quaternary structures. Like proteins, they are comprised of hydrophobic and hydrophilic subunits, but unlike proteins, they are not made with the twenty naturally-occurring amino acids. Foldamers are attractive for bioapplications, but controlling their higher-order folded structure has proved difficult. Furthermore, while studies on foldamers have been done in non-polar and moderately polar solvents, researchers have made little headway in designing aqueous foldamers.