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Across the shoulder runs one word that Drake inscribed, with a sharpened stick or similar tool: “catination,” a variant of catenation, the state of being yoked or chained.

The ordinary places we think we know onshore are an altogether different matter seen — and heard — from the water, where the creatures with whom we share this place are cavorting in a spring catenation of life.

The authors took advantage of this fortuitous process to devise a protocol for making large, self-assembled polycatenanes by using a solution of toroids as ‘seeds’ for catenation.

The construction of larger systems is limited by the efficiency of the catenation step, in which a preassembled toroid precursor forms a ring that interlinks through another toroid; moreover, a large number of covalent bonds must be formed in the preassembled structure.

The authors found that addition of monomers in small portions favours the initiation of self-assembly processes that lead to catenation and were thus able to produce linear and branched polycatenanes containing up to 22 rings.