Bolitoglossa

Some people work with proteins attached to synthetic polymers. The terms are "Protein-Polymer hybrid" and "Protein-Polymer conjugates". To make them, you either have to get an "initiator" into a protein (that is, a moiety from which you can begin a polymerization reaction) and grow a polymer from it, or you can attach a pre-made polymer to it. These can be used to purify proteins, to form encapsulating polymer gels for drug delivery, for attachment, and other uses. One of the projects in the lab I work at involves regulating the function of the protein by growing a polymer that responds to the environment close to the active site, but we haven't gotten it to work yet.

You can do most of those things with Avogadro, which is free and very straightforward to use. I am not sure about the "simulating those bonds under different heat/pressure", I don't fully understand what you would want to simulate. Unsure about the decay and alpha particles. For electronics, you can use GAMESS to calculate the orbital properties using whatever models/parameters you choose, and then import it into VMD to visualize. For proteins, use PyMol or Chimera. All of these programs are free online.

Hello Maddog, Let me make a small correction to your second post; bases are not amino acids, they are nucleotides. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, and chemically dissimilar to nucleotides. Three bases will code for a specific amino acid to be incorporated into a growing protein chain. The answer to your question is yes - scientists have been able to find alternative base pairs. A very good example is the 7-(2-thienyl)-imidazo[4,5-b]pyridine (Ds) and pyrrole-2-carbaldehyde (Pa) pair, published in Nature Methods in 2006. (Hirao, Ichiro, et al. "An unnatural hydrophobic base pair system: site-specific incorporation of nucleotide analogs into DNA and RNA." Nature Methods 3.9 (2006): 729-735.) This specific pair will not form hydrogen bonds with each other like the regular bases, but will rather pair through hydrophobic packing. You can find other examples in the literature. I am currently working (as an undergrad) in a lab with "unnatural" or "non-canonical" amino acids. We evolve the genetic machinery in ways that allow us to modify the genetic code so that we can genetically incorporate new amino acids not found in nature, giving new useful properties to proteins. It is not necessary to use new base pairs to do this, as we can simply "hijack" some of the codons (there are 64 codons, 61 code for 20 amino acids, 3 codons are "stop" codons, we usually hijack one of the three stop codons, the UAG). However, new base pairs will become very useful once the technology expands.

Certainly one of my favorite frogs, with its amazing co-ossified skull used to block the entrance of its burrows in order to reduce its evaporative water loss. I also like this one... Not as odd, though. And of course.. Possessing one of the quickest muscles in their tongue-projection mechanism, lacking lungs and thus relying on cutaneous + buccopharyngeal respiration, cool chemically-receptive nasolabial grooves, having one of the smallest number of braincells among the vertebrates, having some specialized webbed feet with some adhesive properties, being able to store lots of fat in its tail, and many many many more awesome stuff! You should watch this video, it rocks!