Control over Conformational Landscapes of Polypeptoids by Monomer Sequence Patterning

The ability to program chain conformation and structure through control over the monomer sequence of synthetic polymers has broad implications for next-generation material design. While related problems of protein folding and de novo design have generated accurate predictions of three-dimensional (3D) folded chain structures, generalization to synthetic polymers remains intractable due to the requirement of large structural databases and the intrinsically disordered nature of polymer building blocks. In this work, polypeptoids, a class of peptidomimetic synthetic polymers, are utilized to build a general workflow for the study of relationships between the monomer sequence and dynamic 3D chain structure in solution. This work demonstrates how control over the monomer sequence can alter the conformational landscape of synthetic polymers to deviate dramatically from classical chain statistics. Specifically, the distribution of end-to-end distances, as measured by double electron–electron resonance spectroscopy in dilute solvent, is systematically skewed toward shorter distances with an increasing number of hydrophobes and further refined by hydrophobe arrangement in amphiphilic polypeptoid chains.