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Science 20 July 2001:
Vol. 293. no. 5529, pp. 446 - 447
DOI: 10.1126/science.1063289
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Perspectives

POLYMER DYNAMICS:
Chance Encounters

Thomas P. Russell

Flexible polymers can form a vast number of different conformations, not all of which are equally probable. But as Russell explains in his Perspective, rare, short-lived excursions of the chains into very high energy states must exist. These events are difficult to detect, however. He highlights the report by Jeppesen et al., who have devised a methodology to enable their detection. Their results show that infrequent or energetically unfavorable conformations do nevertheless play an important role in long-range molecular recognition events.

The author is in the Polymer Science and Engineering Department, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003, USA. E-mail: russell{at}mail.pse.umass.edu

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)