Harnessing biological motors to engineer systems for nanoscale transport and assembly

REVIEW ARTICLE

Harnessing biological motors to engineer systems for nanoscale transportand assembly

Living systems use biological nanomotors to build lifes essential moleculessuch as DNA and proteinsas well as to transport cargo inside cells with both spatial and temporal precision. Each motor is highly specialized and carries out a distinct function within the cell. Some have even evolved sophisticated mechanisms to ensure quality control during nanomanufacturing processes, whether to correct errors in biosynthesis or to detect and permit the repair of damaged transport highways. In general, these nanomotors consume chemical energy in order to undergo a series of shape changes that let them interact sequentially with other molecules. Here we review some of the many tasks that biomotors perform and analyse their underlying design principles from an engineering perspective. We also discuss experiments and strategies to integrate biomotors into synthetic environments for applications such as sensing, transport and assembly.

ANITA GOEL1,2 AND VIOLA VOGEL3

1Nanobiosym Labs, 200 Boston Avenue, Suite 4700, Medford, Massachusetts 02155 USA; 2Department of Physics, Harvard University, Massachusetts 02138, USA; 3Department of Materials, ETH Zurich,Wolfgang Pauli Strasse 10. HCI F443, 8093 Zurich, Switzerlande-mail: mailto:[email protected]

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By considering how the biological machinery of our cells carries out many dierent functions with a high level of specicity, we can identify a number of engineering principles that can be used to harness these sophisticated molecular machines for applications outside their usual environments. Here we focus on two broad classes of nanomotors that burn chemical energy to move along linear tracks: assembly nanomotors and transport nanomotors.

SEQUENTIAL ASSEMBLY AND POLYMERIZATION

The molecular machinery found in our cells is responsible for the sequential assembly of complex biopolymers from their component building blocks (monomers): polymerases make DNA and RNA from nucleic acids, and ribosomes construct proteins from amino acids. These assembly nanomotors operate in conjunction with a master DNA or RNA template that denes the order in which individual building blocks must be incorporated into a new biopolymer. In addition to recognizing and binding the correct substrates (from a pool of many dierent ones), the motors must also catalyse the chemical reaction that joins them into a growing polymer chain. Moreover, both types of motors have evolved highly sophisticated mechanisms so that...