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Under Benerito's leadership, a team of chemists found one important piece of the “how to wrinkle-proof cotton” puzzle when they developed a new process for treating the fibers. The process, called cross-linking, joins new ring-shaped organic compounds to the polymer chains, replacing the hydrogen bonds with strong new chemical bonds (see Figure 4). (For more about basic organic compounds, see our Carbon Chemistry: An Introduction module.) Cross-linking keeps the polymers from breaking apart, so the cotton fabric comes out of the dryer without wrinkles.
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