They are appealing for biological applications because of their potential functionality, biocompatibility, and similarity to biomacromolecules such as nucleic acids.
DNAzymes have been extensively studied as biosensors because of their unique functionality of cleaving substrate in the presence of metal ion cofactors.
These clones were not better or worse competitors than other clones in the evolution environment because of their reduced functionality, however (data not shown).
Microsatellites or simple sequence repeats (SSRs) in expressed sequence tags (ESTs) are useful resources for genome analysis because of their abundance, functionality and polymorphism.
However, polymorphisms in coding regions resulting in a non-conservative amino-acid substitution in conserved regions of the genome, or in potential transcription factor binding sites, are also studied because of their potential functionality.
Natural antibiotics like hedamycin and altromycin B are able to intercalate into the dsDNA followed by alkylation of guanine at the N7 position because of their epoxide functionality [ 7– 9].
Fuel cell/battery (FCB) systems are promising power generation/energy storage systems because of their bi-functionality as fuel cells and as secondary batteries.
Among such available options, polymer nanocomposites are recognized to have the potential to bring future revolution, especially because of their flexible functionalities and related advantages (e.g., good strength, large surface area to volume ratio, large flame retardancy, high elastic modulus, enhanced density, and thermo-mechanical/optoelectronic/magnetic properties).
Signaling pathways offer an excellent framework for deriving models of biological activity because their functionality can be easily conceptualized: it simply consists on the potential of transmitting a signal from the protein that receives a stimulus (signal input) to the effector protein that triggers the action (signal output) in response to the stimulus.
Systems-in-foil are receiving a lot of attention because of their robustness, multi-functionality, and reel-to-reel manufacturability.
