Also thanks to Chris Broomell at the UC Santa Barbara Cellular, Molecular and Developmental Biology department and VFBer with whom I have been having a running discussion on this. He also noted much of the same as Henk.
Kind of back to square one *g*...buy some, test it and see.
Wes
Henk Verhaar wrote:
Another question pertaining to the research I am doing. I got a message back from a manufacturer who said that like cotton, nylon was also PROTEIN based. Really?
Bull. The only remote semblance is that nylon monomers are linked through an amide bond (the generic chemical name for the nylon range of polymers is polyamides. Kevlar, which is an aromatic polyamide, or aramide, in a way is also a nylon).
There are several nylons. The most well known are nylon66, made from 1,6-diaminohexane and 1,6-hexanedioic acid (adipic acid; see also http://www.ucdsb.on.ca/tiss/stretton/chem3/ Lab_10_Nylon_Preparation.html), and nylon6, made from caprolactam, which basically is a 6-carbon monomer with the amino group on one side and the carboxylic acid group on the other side (see e.g. http://www.psrc.usm.edu/macrog/nysix.htm).
MOREOVER, cotton ain't protein based either. Cotton is a 'sugar' (more correctly a cellulose) polymer.
Cellulose fibers are usually dyed by dyes that penetrate the fibers and lightly bind to the polymers; that's why cotton fades during washing. Protein fibers, like wool, are chemically dyed, where the dye actually chemically bonds with the fiber. Most plastics are dyed 'in the mass', where the dye is mixed with the molten polymer before spinning.
