A few months ago I was doing some proof of concept work to support a video I was making (blogs to be published on this soon!) I was interested in methods to accelerate the decomposition of compostable plastics like polylactic acid. I found a set of papers by a group in the US who were designing "random heteropolymers" to embed enzymes that can digest polymers into the actual polymer matrix.

The order of the repeat units in the random heteropolymers is defined using a program called Compositional Drift which takes into account composition drift during batch polymerization when calculating the order of the repeat units. The Compositional Drift program outputs a CSV file containing numbers representing the repeat unit order and so I wrote a simple script which read in the orders of the repeat units, maps to repeat unit names and uses the block copolymer builder to build the polymer.

Whilst the example included here is focused on these specific random heteropolymers, the script can be used to generate any polymer with more than one repeat unit so long as you define the order of the repeat unit names/ID's in a study table.

Note that Dassault Systemes does not support or endorse the use of Compositional Drift. Any use of this 3rd party program is at the users risk.