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 specificity would impact advanced technologies in important ways. Biological macromolecules can self-assemble into motifs that allow them to perform very specific 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 efforts 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 effects of quenched sequence disorder on microphase ordering of molten copolymers. The results we describe show that frustrating quenched disorder affects the way in which these materials form ordered nanostructures in ways which might be profitably 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.