Science Daily April 1, 2019
Researchers in France have constructed synthetic polymers with fully controlled primary structures using solid-phase iterative chemistry, a process that was originally developed to make peptides. In the last few years, the team has been making precisely tailored polymers for data-storage applications. In these polymers, each monomer or subunit stands for a specific piece of information. So far, the researchers have created tiny data storage devices made of layered sequence-coded polymers. Recently observed that the molecular bits that they contain occupy much smaller volumes than do the nucleotides in DNA. They believe that within the next 10 years they will bring anti-counterfeiting and traceability technologies using their precisely tailored polymers to market. Their work will be presented at the 2019 ACS Spring meeting…read more.
Synthetic polymers, such as the one represented above that codes for “ACS,” can store data and be used to thwart counterfeiters. Credit: Jean-François Lutz