An SFU-led collaboration has designed the primary synthetic protein-based motor which harnesses biological reactions to fuel and propel itself.
“Imagine if a Roomba may very well be powered only by the dirt it picks up,” says SFU Physics professor Nancy Forde, considered one of the authors of the study.
The team’s paper, led by SFU Physics PhD graduate Chapin Korosec and published today in Nature Communications, describes a protein-based molecular motor called “The Lawnmower,” which has been designed to chop a lawn of peptide “grass.” The motor uses the digestive enzyme trypsin to chop the peptides and convert them into the energy it must propel itself.
The researchers at SFU and in Lund, Sweden demonstrated that the Lawnmower is able to self-guided motion and will be directed in specific directions using a specially designed track, a vital step towards their implementation in a wide range of settings.
The team’s findings construct on a long time of research on the role and performance of molecular motors in organisms. Because the researchers explain, all living systems, from humans to plants to bacteria, are kept alive by protein-based molecular motors. These motors convert chemical energy from one form into one other to do useful work comparable to facilitating cell division, delivering cargo, swimming towards food or light, and maintaining healthy tissues.
The Lawnmower is the primary artificial motor device created with proteins from nature. As Forde explains, these experiments help researchers test our understanding of how molecular motors work in nature.
“If the principles that we have learned from studying nature’s molecular motors are correct and sufficient, then we must always find a way to construct motors out of various protein parts and have them work in expected ways,” she says.
In the long run molecular motors can have essential applications in medicine and biocomputing. Within the human body, motor proteins are especially essential for transporting cargo inside neurons. Knowing how these molecular machines work could also be key to understanding and treating motoneuron diseases comparable to multiple sclerosis and spastic paraplegia.
Molecular machines designed to mimic biological processes may help healthcare providers deliver more targeted treatment for diseases.
“Influenza is believed to work as a molecular motor to infiltrate the realm around cells to be able to infect them,” Forde says. “Perhaps synthetic motors could use the identical approach, but reasonably than infecting cells, they may very well be engineered to deliver drug payloads to specifically goal diseased cells.”
“We’re inspired by the Nobel-prize-winning physicist, Richard Feynman, who famously wrote ‘What I cannot create, I don’t understand.’ Our team’s work goals to check our understanding of the elemental operational principles of molecular machines by attempting to create them from scratch.”
