Literatura científica selecionada sobre o tema "Molecular machines and motors"

Nature uses molecular motors and machines in virtually every significant biological process, but learning how to design and assemble simpler artificial structures that function through controlled molecular-level motion is a major challenge for contemporary physical science. The established engineering principles of the macroscopic world can offer little more than inspiration to the molecular engineer who creates devices for an environment where everything is constantly moving and being buffeted by other atoms and molecules. Rather, experimental designs for working molecular machines must follow principles derived from chemical kinetics, thermodynamics, and nonequilibrium statistical physics. The remarkable characteristics of interlocked molecules make them particularly useful for investigating the control of motion at the molecular level. Yet, the vast majority of synthetic molecular machines studied to date are simple two-state switches. Here we outline recent developments from our laboratory that demonstrate more complex molecular machine functions. This new generation of synthetic molecular machines can move continuously and progressively away from equilibrium, and they may be considered true prototypical molecular motors. The examples discussed exemplify two, fundamentally different, "Brownian ratchet" mechanisms previously developed in theoretical statistical physics and realized experimentally in molecular-level devices for the first time in these systems.

AbstractThe bottom-up construction and operation of machines and motors of molecular size is a topic of great interest in nanoscience, and a fascinating challenge of nanotechnology. Researchers in this field are stimulated and inspired by the outstanding progress of molecular biology that has begun to reveal the secrets of the natural nanomachines which constitute the material base of life. Like their macroscopic counterparts, nanoscale machines need energy to operate. Most molecular motors of the biological world are fueled by chemical reactions, but research in the last fifteen years has demonstrated that light energy can be used to power nanomachines by exploiting photochemical processes in appropriately designed artificial systems. As a matter of fact, light excitation exhibits several advantages with regard to the operation of the machine, and can also be used to monitor its state through spectroscopic methods. In this review we will illustrate the design principles at the basis of photochemically driven molecular machines, and we will describe a few examples based on rotaxane-type structures investigated in our laboratories.

DNA has been used to construct a wide variety of nanoscale molecular devices. Inspiration for such synthetic molecular machines is frequently drawn from protein motors, which are naturally occurring and ubiquitous. However, despite the fact that rotary motors such as ATP synthase and the bacterial flagellar motor play extremely important roles in nature, very few rotary devices have been constructed using DNA. This paper describes an experimental study of the putative mechanism of a rotary DNA nanomotor, which is based on strand displacement, the phenomenon that powers many synthetic linear DNA motors. Unlike other examples of rotary DNA machines, the device described here is designed to be capable of autonomous operation after it is triggered. The experimental results are consistent with operation of the motor as expected, and future work on an enhanced motor design may allow rotation to be observed at the single-molecule level. The rotary motor concept presented here has potential applications in molecular processing, DNA computing, biosensing and photonics.