n new perspectives for engineering active robotics at the nanoscale. The paper by Delft University of Technology researchers will be published today inRotary motors have been the powerhouses of human societies for millennia. We can look back in history to the windmills and waterwheels across the Netherlands and the world. Today, advanced offshore wind turbines drive our green-energy future.
“These rotary motors, driven by a flow, also feature prominently in biological cells. An example is the FoF1-ATP synthase, which produces the fuel that cells need to operate. But the synthetic construction at the nanoscale has thus far remained elusive,” says Dr. Xin Shi, postdoctoral researcher in the lab of professor Cees Dekker in the department of Bionanoscience at Delft University of Technology .material. This structure is docked onto a nanopore, a tiny opening, in a thin membrane.
In a further step the group has used the knowledge they learned from building this self-organized rotor to make the next important advance: the first rationally designed nanoscale turbine. “Like how science and technologies always work, we started from a simple pinwheel, now are able to recreate the beautiful Dutch windmills, but this time with a size of only 25 nm, the size of one single protein in your body,” says Shi, “and we demonstrated their ability to carry loads.
“And now, the rotation direction was set by the designed chirality,” Dekker adds. “Left-handed turbines rotated clockwise; right-handed ones rotated anticlockwise.”Next to better understanding and mimicking motor proteins such as FoF1-ATP synthase, the results open new perspectives for engineering active robotics at the nanoscale. Shi: “What we have demonstrated here is a nanoscale engine that is truly able to transduce energy and do work.
Reference: “Sustained unidirectional rotation of a self-organized DNA rotor on a nanopore” 4 August 2022,