Double helical conformation and extreme rigidity in a rodlike polyelectrolyte

Double helix structures appear widely in nature, but only rarely in synthetic non-chiral macromolecules. Here the authors describe a double helix in a densely charged aromatic polyamide, which exhibits an axial rigidity persistence length of ~ 1 μm, much higher than that of DNA (~ 50 nm).

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ying Wang, Yadong He, Zhou Yu, Jianwei Gao, Stephanie ten Brinck, Carla Slebodnick, Gregory B. Fahs, Curt J. Zanelotti, Maruti Hegde, Robert B. Moore, Bernd Ensing, Theo J. Dingemans, Rui Qiao, Louis A. Madsen
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Nature Publishing Group 2019-02-01
Series:Nature Communications
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-08756-3