Engineering Approaches to Biomolecular Motors

Engineering Approaches to Biomolecular Motors: From in vitro to in vivo Wednesday Speaker Abstracts

Biomimetic Nanowalkers: a Nanoengineering Path to the General Science behind Motor

Proteins

Zhisong Wang

National University of Singapore, Singapore.

Motor proteins are a key player in enabling a great variety of biological functions from the

molecular level to the cellular level, such as energy conversion, force generation in cell division,

and long-range intracellular transport. It is a long-standing challenge to decipher the underlying

science of these single-molecule motors and enabled functionalities at larger scale. Three

strategies are being pursued thus far to tackle the challenge and harvest the science for

biotechnology and nanotechnology. The first strategy is the heads-on biophysical study of the

biological systems with ever new techniques of better spatial-temporal resolution. The second is

a synthetic-biology strategy in which the biological systems are cast in a rationally engineered

setup to mimic the original biological setup or extend for new bio/nanotechnological

applications. In this talk, I shall discuss the third strategy that has a synthetic component too but

shifted towards a thorough physical strategy. Here an entirely artificial nanomotor is invented

following the lessons from biomotor study, and offers a parallel model system to study the same

general science governing both biological and man-made nanomotors and related functionalities.

As a specific example, I shall focus on our recent study of a new class of bioinspired bipedal

DNA nanowalkers that capture some key aspects of cytoplasmic dyneins, especially a highly

modularized construction and versatile regulation of directionality, speed and force generation.

These rationally designed motors generate new insights to rationalize some biophysical findings

of cytoplasmic dyneins, and also demonstrate a general modular design principle that potentially

leads to many new track-walking nanomotors from simpler but widely reported switch-like

nanodevices.