Every year, thousands of tons of brown algae are extracted from the seabed to obtain compounds such as alginates, a polymer ...

Used in a test tube, the system worked: Amino acids were linked together in a polymer. The question was whether it would work in cells. Unfortunately, one of the two enzymes turns out to be mildly ...

When introduced into E. coli, these enzymes enabled the bacteria to stitch together amino acids into polymers, potentially forming biodegradable plastics. By tweaking the amino acid content in the ...

Peptides are amino acid polymers. They are generally much smaller than proteins and don’t have sufficient activity on their own – they generally represent a small portion of a full protein.

Research suggests that calcium may have played a key role in guiding the development of a specific molecular handedness in primitive polyesters and early biomolecules. A new study from the Earth-Life ...

A new study has uncovered a surprising role for calcium in shaping life’s earliest molecular structures, shedding light on ...

Single molecules, called monomers, would have needed a repetitive process to give them time to link up in long molecular chains, called polymers: it takes many amino acids to make a protein and ...

coli; this process involves combining one or more of six amino acids with one or more hydroxy acids to create the polymer plastic. After further tests to optimize the process, Lee and colleagues ...