• Brainstorming
• Team
• Gallery
• Calendar
• Protocols
• Biosafety
• Acknowledgments
• Contact

Micro-Motor - Overview

The potential to generate mechanical power to drive microdevices has a great significance in future energy exploitation as well as medical science. Fortunately, nature has provides numerous examples of nanometer-scale molecular machines. Some functional nanodevices derived from living systems, like motor proteins, can efficiently convert chemical energy into mechanical work.

Using life-form power to propel micromotors has a number of unique advantages over other energy generating process, including efficient conversion of chemical energy into mechanical work and the potential for procedure control. The development of an appropriate interface between such biological materials and synthetic devices should enable us to realize useful hybrid micromachines.

In this project, we described some micromotors driven by bacteria. The motor is one of the most important parts of the bactomotor project. It provides a surface on which the E. coli cells can bind to and the swimming motion of them can be used to propel it. In order to achieve this design, the well-studied biotin-strepatavidin interaction was applied to bind the bacteria to the motor.

The motor we need should have the following two main characteristics:

1. It should be symmetrical and small enough to match the size of bacteria, saying ~ 50μm.
2. It is feasible that only one side of the motor has biotin binding on it, which means that bacteria can push the motor to rotate in either clockwise or counterclockwise.

Besides, it needs to be rigid and can undergo chemical modifications through which biotin can be coated on its surface.

With the above considerations taken into, we have designed two versions of motor, by using either Immobilon-P transfer membrane or the inorganic elemental silicon.