Making Smart Polymers Smarter: Modern Concepts to Regulate Functions in Polymer Science

This highlight summarizes recent attempts and advances of macromolecular sciences to abstract the biological concept of regulation and import it into synthetic polymer systems. The differences of responsive switching exploited in smart polymers and regulation present in the biological world of proteins are evident. Therefore, the biomimetic regulation might advance the possibilities of polymer science beyond these of established smart polymers and makes precise regulation of functions through signaling events, signal transduction and even complex regulative circuits possible. (C) 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Polym Sci Part A: Polym Chem 48: 1-14, 2010