Yuwei Gu was hiking through Bear Mountain State Park in New York when inspiration struck.
Yuwei Gu was hiking through Bear Mountain State Park in New York when inspiration struck.
Plastic bottles littered the trail and more floated on a nearby lake. The jarring sight in such a pristine environment made the Rutgers chemist stop in his tracks. Nature makes plenty of long-stranded molecules called polymers, including DNA and RNA, yet those natural polymers eventually break down. Synthetic polymers such as plastics don’t. Why?
“Biology uses polymers everywhere, such as proteins, DNA, RNA and cellulose, yet nature never faces the kind of long-term accumulation problems we see with synthetic plastics,” said Gu, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology in the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences.
Read more at: Rutgers University
Chemist Yuwei Gu (at left) and graduate student Shaozheng Yin employ a gel permeation chromatography machine to measure the size of polymers and how they break down. The analysis is an important aspect of their work. (Photo Credit: Gu Lab)
