Tiny machines need tiny motors. Now, researchers have designed an on-off switch for a motor made from a spinning protein fragment just 11 nanometers wide.
A motor such as this one, based on a natural protein, might someday operate nanoscale machines such as drug-delivery systems, says Carlo Montemagno of the University of California, Los Angeles. He and his colleagues describe their controllable minimotor in the November Nature Materials.
The protein that Montemagno and his colleagues used is an enzyme ATP synthase, which produces the cellular fuel adenosine triphosphate. The researchers worked specifically with a spinning fragment of ATP synthase called F1-ATPase.