Single polymer growth dynamics

Watching growth, step by step Polymers can grow through the stepwise addition of monomers to an active end site. One might think that this would happen in a continuous linear process. With a focus on ring-opening metathesis polymerization of norbornene catalyzed by a Grubbs' catalyst, Liu et al. describe the growth of a single polymer chain. By attaching one end of a growing polymer to a bead exerting a constant force on it, they measured the extension occurring during the growth of the polymer. Oddly, the extension of the growing polymer did not increase continuously. Instead, it exhibited consecutive wait-and-jump steps, owing to conformational entanglements formed by newly incorporated monomers. Science , this issue p. 352