Self-Fueling Synthetic Protein Motor “Mows”

The body uses tiny machines made of proteins to do important jobs. These machines help with things like cell division and moving around inside cells. Now, scientists made their own version called ‘The Lawnmower.’ It works like the natural machines moving itself using the energy it gets from cutting through proteins. This could lead to new treatments for many illnesses.

Think about a vacuum cleaner that only needs the dirt it sucks up to keep going. That’s what Nancy Forde, a physics professor at Simon Fraser University, compares ‘The Lawnmower’ to. She and her team made this synthetic motor. It gets its power from chemical reactions in living things.

All living things, from humans to tiny bacteria, rely on protein-based machines to stay alive. These machines turn one type of energy into the forces needed for things like moving around and staying healthy. Scientists from SFU and LU in Sweden used what they learned from studying natural machines to build ‘The Lawnmower.’

Forde “if we follow the rules we’ve learned from studying nature’s molecules, we should be able to build motors using different protein parts that work as expected.”

The researchers got their idea from a type of tiny motors found in nature called burnt-bridge ratchets (BBRs). These motors move in one direction for a long distance using energy-rich substances, which stops them from moving backward. Using this idea, they made the first molecular motor from natural proteins, calling it The Lawnmower.

How Lawnmower looks like?

The Lawnmower looks like a ball covered in trypsin, which is a type of enzyme that helps break down proteins in the body. When it lands on a surface, the trypsin ‘blades’ stick to and cut up peptides, which are shorter proteins, turning them into energy. As there are fewer peptides left behind, there’s a kind of slope that pushes The Lawnmower towards the uncut peptide ‘grass.’ It keeps ‘mowing’ as it moves, going at speeds similar to tiny motors found in living things. The researchers also discovered that if they made patterns of peptide ‘grass’ on tiny tracks, The Lawnmower could follow those tracks.

The Lawnmower could be super useful in medicine and biocomputing. When molecular motors in our nerve cells don’t work right, it can cause a lot of different nerve diseases in humans. If we understand how these motors function normally and when things go wrong, we might be able to treat diseases like multiple sclerosis and spastic paraplegia better. Also, we could use them to send medicine exactly where it’s needed in the body.

Forde mentioned that the flu virus kind of acts like a tiny motor to sneak into the area around cells and infect them. But what if we could make synthetic motors that do the same thing, except instead of causing infections, they carry medicine right to the cells that need it most? That could be a powerful way to treat diseases.

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