The influences of polymerization temperature, initiator and monomer concentrations, ionic strength of the aqueous phase, as well as ethylene glycol dimethacrylate (EGDM) comonomer, on the kinetics of the emulsifier-free emulsion polymerization of methyl methacrylate (MMA) and on the properties of the resulting poly(methy1 methacrylate) (PMMA) lattices were studied. The polymerizations were carr...

The cure kinetics of polydicyclopentadiene prepared by ring-opening metathesis polymerization with three different concentrations of Grubbs’ catalyst were examined with differential scanning calorimetry. The experimental data were used to test several different phenomenological kinetic models. The data were best modeled with a model-free isoconversional method. This analysis revealed that the a...

Living anionic polymer chains polymerized with organolithium initiators usually form aggregates through their Li ends in nonpolar solvents. This aggregation structure strongly affects the anionic polymerization (propagation) kinetics. In the conventional molecular picture, the aggregates are assumed to be chemically inert and the propagation occurs only though the dissociated unimers, which lea...

Reverse transcriptase (RT) catalyzes the conversion of the viral RNA into an integration-competent double-stranded DNA, with a variety of enzymatic activities that include the ability to displace a non-template strand concomitantly with polymerization. Here, using high-resolution optical tweezers to follow the activity of the murine leukemia Virus RT, we show that strand-displacement polymeriza...