Our researchers should be jumping for joy, This should allow exact delivery of drugs within the brain and put in sensors that tell us how neuroplasticity works and if neurogenesis/stem cells survive. So many uses and I bet no-one in stroke will even think of the possibilities.
http://www.rdmag.com/news/2015/11/rice-makes-light-driven-nanosubmarine?
Though they're not quite ready for boarding a lá "Fantastic Voyage,"
nanoscale submarines created at Rice University are proving themselves
seaworthy.
Each of the single-molecule, 244-atom submersibles built in the Rice
lab of chemist James Tour has a motor powered by ultraviolet light. With
each full revolution, the motor's tail-like propeller moves the sub
forward 18 nanometers.
And with the motors running at more than a million RPM, that
translates into speed. Though the sub's top speed amounts to less than 1
inch per second, Tour said that's a breakneck pace on the molecular
scale.
"These are the fastest-moving molecules ever seen in solution," he said.
Expressed in a different way, the researchers reported this month in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters that
their light-driven nanosubmersibles show an "enhancement in diffusion"
of 26 percent. That means the subs diffuse, or spread out, much faster
than they already do due to Brownian motion, the random way particles
spread in a solution.
While they can't be steered yet, the study proves molecular motors
are powerful enough to drive the sub-10-nanometer subs through solutions
of moving molecules of about the same size.
"This is akin to a person walking across a basketball court with 1,000 people throwing basketballs at him," Tour said.
Tour's group has extensive experience with molecular machines. A
decade ago, his lab introduced the world to nanocars, single-molecule
cars with four wheels, axles and independent suspensions that could be
"driven" across a surface.
Tour said many scientists have created microscopic machines with
motors over the years, but most have either used or generated toxic
chemicals. He said a motor that was conceived in the last decade by a
group in the Netherlands proved suitable for Rice's submersibles, which
were produced in a 20-step chemical synthesis.
"These motors are well-known and used for different things," said
lead author and Rice graduate student Victor García-López. "But we were
the first ones to propose they can be used to propel nanocars and now
submersibles."
The motors, which operate more like a bacteria's flagellum than a
propeller, complete each revolution in four steps. When excited by
light, the double bond that holds the rotor to the body becomes a single
bond, allowing it to rotate a quarter step. As the motor seeks to
return to a lower energy state, it jumps adjacent atoms for another
quarter turn. The process repeats as long as the light is on.
For comparison tests, the lab also made submersibles with no motors,
slow motors and motors that paddle back and forth. All versions of the
submersibles have pontoons that fluoresce red when excited by a laser,
according to the researchers. (Yellow, sadly, was not an option.)
"One of the challenges was arming the motors with the appropriate
fluorophores for tracking without altering the fast rotation,"
García-López said.
Once built, the team turned to Gufeng Wang at North Carolina State University to measure how well the nanosubs moved.
"We had used scanning tunneling microscopy and fluorescence
microscopy to watch our cars drive, but that wouldn't work for the
submersibles," Tour said. "They would drift out of focus pretty
quickly."
The North Carolina team sandwiched a drop of diluted acetonitrile
liquid containing a few nanosubs between two slides and used a custom
confocal fluorescence microscope to hit it from opposite sides with both
ultraviolet light (for the motor) and a red laser (for the pontoons).
The microscope's laser defined a column of light in the solution
within which tracking occurred, García-López said. "That way, the NC
State team could guarantee it was analyzing only one molecule at a
time," he said.
Rice's researchers hope future nanosubs will be able to carry cargoes
for medical and other purposes. "There's a path forward," García-López
said. "This is the first step, and we've proven the concept. Now we need
to explore opportunities and potential applications."
Source: Rice University
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