Disordered Heteropolymers: Models for Biomimetic Polymers and Polymers with Frustrating Quenched Disorder

The ability to design and synthesize polymers that can perform functions with great speci"city would impact advanced technologies in important ways. Biological macromolecules can self-assemble into motifs that allow them to perform very speci"c functions. Thus, in recent years, attention has been directed toward elucidating strategies that would allow synthetic polymers to perform biomimetic functions. In this article, we review recent research e!orts exploring the possibility that heteropolymers with disordered sequence distributions (disordered heteropolymers) can mimic the ability of biological macromolecules to recognize patterns. Results of this body of work suggests that frustration due to competing interactions and quenched disorder may be the essential physics that can enable such biomimetic behavior. These results also show that recognition between disordered heteropolymers and multifunctional surfaces due to statistical pattern matching may be a good model to study kinetics in frustrated systems with quenched disorder. We also review work which demonstrates that disordered heteropolymers with branched architectures are good model systems to study the e!ects of quenched sequence disorder on microphase ordering of molten 0370-1573/01/$ see front matter ( 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 3 7 0 1 5 7 3 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 0 0 6 5 copolymers. The results we describe show that frustrating quenched disorder a!ects the way in which these materials form ordered nanostructures in ways which might be pro"tably exploited in applications. Although the focus of this review is on theoretical and computational research, we discuss connections with existing experimental work and suggest future experiments that are expected to yield further insights. ( 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PACS: 87.15.Aa; 82.35.#t 3 A.K. Chakraborty / Physics Reports 342 (2001) 1}61