{"id":147337,"date":"2022-10-01T09:24:06","date_gmt":"2022-10-01T14:24:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/10\/new-theory-upends-what-we-know-about-how-charged-macromolecules-self-assemble"},"modified":"2022-10-01T09:24:06","modified_gmt":"2022-10-01T14:24:06","slug":"new-theory-upends-what-we-know-about-how-charged-macromolecules-self-assemble","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/10\/new-theory-upends-what-we-know-about-how-charged-macromolecules-self-assemble","title":{"rendered":"New theory upends what we know about how charged macromolecules self-assemble"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/new-theory-upends-what-we-know-about-how-charged-macromolecules-self-assemble2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>In a discovery with wide-ranging implications, researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently announced in the <i>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/i> that uniformly charged macromolecules\u2014or molecules, such as proteins or DNA, that contain a large number of atoms all with the same electrical charge\u2014can self-assemble into very large structures. This finding upends our understanding of how some of life\u2019s basic structures are built.<\/p>\n<p>Traditionally, scientists have understood charged polymer chains as being composed of smaller, uniformly charged units. Such chains, called <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/polyelectrolytes\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">polyelectrolytes<\/a>, display predictable behaviors of self-organization in water: They will repel each other because similarly charged objects don\u2019t like to be close to each other. If you add salt to water containing polyelectrolytes, then molecules coil up, because the chains\u2019 electrical repulsion is screened by the salt.<\/p>\n<p>However, \u201cthe game is very different when you have dipoles,\u201d says Murugappan Muthukumar, the Wilmer D. Barrett Professor in Polymer Science and Engineering at UMass Amherst, the study\u2019s senior author.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a discovery with wide-ranging implications, researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently announced in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that uniformly charged macromolecules\u2014or molecules, such as proteins or DNA, that contain a large number of atoms all with the same electrical charge\u2014can self-assemble into very large structures. This finding upends [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1902,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-147337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bioengineering","category-biotech-medical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147337"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147337\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}