Posted on 12/16/2001 9:26:54 AM PST by adakotab
Cells are a nanotechnologist's dream. Each contains perfectly engineered motors - proteins - transporting and delivering chemicals with unerring precision, all at the millionths of a millimetre scale. Now researchers are printing microscopic maps to marshal this tiny workforce.
In the cell, molecular scaffolding called microtubules directs motor proteins on their delivery rounds. The alternative, fixing the motors and using them to drive the microtubules around carrying chemical cargo, is equally plausible.
To demonstrate this, Taro Uyeda of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Japan and his colleagues coated a glass plate with the motor protein kinesin and poured on a solution of microtubules. The microtubules connected to one kinesin molecule after another and walked across the glass.
To make practical use of this automatic mobilization you have to tell the microtubules where to go. Uyeda's team does this by printing channels a fraction of a millimetre deep into the glass to guide the microtubules' march. Confined to the channels, the microtubules cannot climb out.
Unfortunately which way a microtubule walks along its channel depends on the built-in direction of the motor protein it is connected to. As the proteins are coated onto the glass in random directions, the microtubules walk up and down the channel at random - as many going one way as the other.
Uyeda's group solved this problem by building arrowhead-shaped chambers in the printed channels. The microtubules, like good map-readers, follow the arrows' directions.
Why? Because microtubules going the wrong direction down an arrowhead chamber get stuck in its barbs. They wander in circles until, happening on a motor molecule that points them back the right way, they escape back down the point of the arrow.
Nanofactories
The dream, now a step closer to reality, is to print complete factories onto silicon chips. Channels, arrows, and other more complex shapes will direct microtubule cargo trucks back and forth, collecting, moving and depositing chemicals, products and waste, in a fine-tuned microscopic production line.
Says Uyeda, the next step will be to find a way to load moving microtubules2. The researchers are also working on ways to switch the motor proteins on and off using electric fields.
The Roman engineer Vitruvius insisted that every architect should have a knowledge of anatomy. As Markus Porto, at the Max Planck Institute in Dresden, Germany, points out, the biological motor should be a similar source of inspiration to technologists.
...perfectly engineered motors , boy, that's not going to sit well with our freeper evolutionists...
"Uyeda's group solved this problem by building arrowhead-shaped chambers in the printed channels. The microtubules, like good map-readers, follow the arrows' directions."
Applied Darwinism.
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Speaking of Cancer and things that can go wrong. Much of how the human cell works is not yet understood.
Here is a company that has discovered some very interesting things and seems to be on the way to developing drugs to kill cancer cells:
Selective Apoptotic Antineoplastic Drug (SAAND) Technology : Cell Death and Apoptosis
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