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Nanobiotechnology

Building a basic nanomachine

Nature Nanotechnology volume 6, pages 397–398 (2011)Cite this article

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Attaching certain protein fragments that are found in the nuclear pore complex onto a solid-state nanopore mimics important aspects of the selective transport of molecules and proteins that occurs in real cells.

“What I cannot create, I do not understand.” This phrase, attributed to Richard Feynman, epitomizes the drive to create biomimetic devices using nanotechnology. Writing in Nature Nanotechnology, Roderick Lim, Cees Dekker and colleagues1 report the creation of a minimalistic nuclear pore complex (NPC) by assembling biological and synthetic components into a geometry that resembles the real NPC. The synthetic device shows NPC-like selectivity on the single-molecule level, and provides new insights into some important and still debated aspects of the NPC structure.

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Figure 1: Real NPC structure and the minimalist NPC-like device.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tijana Jovanovic-Talisman is in the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20892, USA,

    Tijana Jovanovic-Talisman

  2. Anton Zilman is in the Department of Physics, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A7, Canada.,

    Anton Zilman

Authors
  1. Tijana Jovanovic-Talisman
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  2. Anton Zilman
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Correspondence to Tijana Jovanovic-Talisman or Anton Zilman.

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Jovanovic-Talisman, T., Zilman, A. Building a basic nanomachine. Nature Nanotech 6, 397–398 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2011.108

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