Abstract
TRANSPORT of molecules in concentrated systems is of fundamental importance in medicine, biology and technology, for example, transport within cartilageneous tissues, the release and distribution within the body of encapsulated drugs and transport of reactants in the production process of plastic materials. These systems are usually multicomponent in nature. In all these processes the transport of substances often has a regulatory role as a rate determining step. An understanding of the transport process of macromolecules in multicomponent systems is therefore essential. Although problems of this type have been treated in a few theoretical1–7 and experimental8–20 studies, the understanding of these systems is incomplete, especially for concentrated solutions. It is known from studies of diffusion in binary systems that a number of features of the transport process appear that do not show up in more dilute systems7,10,18–20. We present here new data for macromolecular systems which show that the diffusion rate of one macromolecule can be ‘paradoxically’ increased considerably by adding a sufficient amount of a suitable second macromolecular component. An interpretation of this effect is advanced in terms of an extension of existing theories of concentrated solutions.
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LAURENT, T., PRESTON, B. & SUNDELÖF, LO. Transport of molecules in concentrated systems. Nature 279, 60–62 (1979). https://doi.org/10.1038/279060a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/279060a0
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