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Asked by Big john to Anne, Arthur, Rose, Ruhina, Thomas on 16 Jun 2015. This question was also asked by Molly, Oreos.
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Anne Canning answered on 16 Jun 2015:
A polymer is a structure which is made up of a large number of repeating units (if singular they are called monomers) bonded together eg. plastics and fabrics are made up of polymers.
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Arthur Wilkinson answered on 18 Jun 2015:
“Poly” and “mer” are from greek words for “many” and “part”, so “polymer” means “many parts”. As Anne said in her answer, a polymer is made up of a small number of atoms arranged in a “repeat unit” and this structure is repeated many times in a polymer molecule, usually as a long chain (like a long piece of string). For example, a molecule of polyethylene from a plastic carrier bag may be chain that about 1500 times longer than its diameter and has 5000 repeat units in it.
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Rose Simnett answered on 18 Jun 2015:
Yep, Anne and Arthur have answered this very well. Polymers can be linear (in a long piece of string) or they can also have more interesting architecture (shape). They can also be a mixture of two or more monomer units and these are called co-polymers. They can be branched, imagine the polymer as a tree where the trunk polymer is different to the branches. They can also be many other different shapes like star, brush or comb shaped.
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Ruhina Miller answered on 19 Jun 2015:
Everyone’s covered this very well! I just want to add on something that Arthur wrote in a chat the other day – we are made up of polymers as DNA is a great example of a polymer
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Thomas Farrugia answered on 22 Jun 2015:
I like to think of polymers as lego bricks that are all chained together. As both Arthur and Ruhina pointed out we’re all made of biological polymers (as is the spaghetti you eat and the paper you write on), and the really cool thing about that is that nature does a lot with very little – DNA is only comprised of four different kinds of monomer, and there are only 21 amino acids which are used to form proteins.
The cool part is that the DNA is used to code for the amino acids – so you need to have three monomers on DNA to code for one particular amino acid (sometimes there’s more than one combination for a certain amino acid). There was some rather laborious research involved in cracking the DNA code – must have bee quite exciting, and at times a race (labs and research groups trying to crack it first so that they could claim some or all the glory!)
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