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Engineering Approaches to Biomolecular Motors: From in vitro to in vivo Poster Abstracts
70
26-POS
Board 26
The Use of Coiled-coil Peptides for Synthetic Molecular Motor Constructs
Lara S. Small
1
, Aimee L. Boyle
7,2
, Andrew R. Thomson
2
, Marc Bruning
2
, Paul M. Curmi
4
,
Nancy R. Forde
5
, Heiner Linke
6
, Derek N. Woolfson
2,3
, Martin J. Zuckermann
5
, Elizabeth H.
Bromley
1
.
2
University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom,
1
Durham University, Durham, County Durham,
United Kingdom,
3
University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom,
4
University of New South
Wales, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia,
5
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada,
6
Lund University, Lund, Sweden,
7
Universiteit Leiden, Leiden, Netherlands.
A vast array of biological processes, in the human body and beyond, are reliant on the successful
function of molecular motors. These protein-based molecular machines are involved in many
fundamental cellular activities, from muscle contraction to cell division. The complexity of
interactions between the amino acids which make up these proteins make them both the preferred
building materials of nature, and difficult systems to fully explore. In addition to improving our
knowledge of how these natural proteins perform their individual tasks, understanding and
replicating these impressive abilities is highly attractive for bionanotechnology applications.
One means of understanding such systems is through bottom-up design of synthetic molecular
motors. Our aim is to combine coiled-coil peptide designs with other molecular components to
devise and produce synthetic motors. These include the Tumbleweed, a synthetic molecular
motor designed to progress via rectified diffusion along a DNA track. One design for the
formation of the Tumbleweed motor is reliant on the self-assembly of orthogonal coiled coils, a
peptide motif commonly found in nature. I will discuss the requirements of such a system, and
the biophysical characterisation of a set of designed peptides with the ability to form a suitable
structure, demonstrated using circular dichroism, dynamic light scattering, analytical
ultracentrifugation and disulphide exchange reactions.
Reference
Bromley et al., The Tumbleweed: towards a synthetic protein motor, HFSP Journal. 2009 Jun;
3(3): 204–212