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Polymers are a simple monomer repeated many times. Proteins can be arbitrary non-repeating sequences. These are not the same.

• gilleain 8y ago
  Not so. There are of course, 'uniform' polymers made from a single repeating subunit. However, natural non-uniform ones like proteins are also polymers, as are synthetic ones with two repeating units (EVA, for example). From wikipedia: > Polymers that contain only a single type of repeat unit are known as homopolymers, while polymers containing two or more types of repeat units are known as copolymers. Trivially, there are protein homopolymers like polyglycine. They are definitely proteins.
  • nmca 8y ago
    This is technically correct, but it doesn't really capture the spirit of what I was saying - an arbitrary long keyboard mash of the 20 bases is a protein, most things called "copolymers" are substantially simpler. Perhaps it is useful to differentiate between (simple) polymers and (arbitrarily complex polymers called) proteins, perhaps it is not. I can see why if you dealt with polyglycine a lot it would be annoying :)
    • gilleain 8y ago
      You are quite right that the properties of most proteins are very different to that of even copolymers. In fact, simple structural proteins (like keratin, collagen, etc) are much more like synthetic homopolymers than the complex nanomachines such as ATP-synthase or the proteosome.
• dekhn 8y ago
  Proteins are polymers, just not homopolymers (those are simple repeats).