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Nanomachines

A light-powered clockwork

Nature Nanotechnology volume 12, pages 504–506 (2017)Cite this article

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An organogel is made of molecular motors and modulators that act cooperatively to perform a full mechanical cycle of contraction and expansion at the macroscale.

In solution, an Avogadro's number of these motors would rotate unidirectionally but produce no net mechanical output. In 2015, Li et al. showed that the motion of such motors can be collectively amplified to produce work at the macroscale9. In this design (Fig. 2b), polymer chains were covalently attached to the rotors and stators. When the molecular motors are in operation, each rotor (and stator) braids the attached polymer chains, thereby transforming the rotational motion into translational motion and contracting the polymer network regardless of the motors' positions and orientations. This cooperative molecular motion stores the input energy into potential energy in the braided polymer chains of the organogel — one can consider this operation as analogous to winding the crown of a mechanical watch to coil the mainspring. The main limitation of this first-generation design was that the contraction motion is irreversible and the potential energy cannot be released without breaking a covalent bond.

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Figure 1: Graphical illustration of a mechanical watch (left) and the mainspring winding mechanism (right).
Figure 2: A macroscopic contraction–expansion cycle completed by operating molecular motors and modulators in a polymer network.

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  1. Chenfeng Ke is in the Department of Chemistry, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire 03755, USA,

    Chenfeng Ke

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  1. Chenfeng Ke
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Correspondence to Chenfeng Ke.

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Ke, C. A light-powered clockwork. Nature Nanotech 12, 504–506 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2017.44

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