Polymers are long molecules made from periodically connected molecular building blocks called monomers. Some polymers occur naturally in the shape of closed rings—for example as plasmids, cyclic DNA strands in bacteria, or for sufficiently long protein chains. Imagine immersing such objects into a solvent constrained between two parallel plates. We talk about shearing the system when we pull these plates in anti-parallel directions.
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Source: Phys.org