Nanoscale rotary engine created is smaller than an HIV cell

This new motor is so tiny even an HIV virus dwarfs it. A team of physicists led by Philip Ketterer of the Technical University of Munich have just built, molecule by molecule, the smallest rotary engine ever created by man.

Only 40 nanometers tall, the tiny device is made of three separate components that click together to form crude versions of an axle bearing and a spinning crank lever.

ABSTRACT

We report a nanoscale rotary mechanism that reproduces some of the dynamic properties of biological rotary motors in the absence of an energy source, such as random walks on a circle with dwells at docking sites. Our mechanism is built modularly from tight-fitting components that were self-assembled using multilayer DNA origami. The apparatus has greater structural complexity than previous mechanically interlocked objects and features a well-defined angular degree of freedom without restricting the range of rotation. We studied the dynamics of our mechanism using single-particle experiments analogous to those performed previously with actin-labeled adenosine triphosphate synthases. In our mechanism, rotor mobility, the number of docking sites, and the dwell times at these sites may be controlled through rational design. Our prototype thus realizes a working platform toward creating synthetic nanoscale rotary motors. Our methods will support creating other complex nanoscale mechanisms based on tightly fitting, sterically constrained, but mobile, DNA components.