Scientists developing new biomaterials often try to mimic the body's natural proteins, but a chemist shows that simpler polymers -- based on a handful of plastic building blocks -- also work well.

While natural polymers, including starches and cellulose, are still commonly used in biomedical research, the utilization of synthetic biodegradable polymers in pharmaceutical and tissue-engineering ...

Designing plastics that can be broken down easily after their use phase have often required a trade-off between stability and ...

Biodegradable polymers are a type of polymer that exists both naturally and can be synthesized in laboratories. This special class of polymer is broken down naturally by microbial processes to produce ...

All materials are subject to fatigue and environmental wear and tear, which causes them to degrade over time. This affects the properties of the material and eventually leads to their failure.

Most life on Earth is based on polymers of 20 amino acids that have evolved into hundreds of thousands of different, highly specialized proteins. They catalyze reactions, form backbone and muscle and ...