Engineering Approaches to Biomolecular Motors

Engineering Approaches to Biomolecular Motors: From in vitro to in vivo Poster Abstracts

26-POS Board 26 The Use of Coiled-coil Peptides for Synthetic Molecular Motor Constructs Lara S. Small 1 , Aimee L. Boyle 7,2 , Andrew R. Thomson 2 , Marc Bruning 2 , Paul M. Curmi 4 , Nancy R. Forde 5 , Heiner Linke 6 , Derek N. Woolfson 2,3 , Martin J. Zuckermann 5 , Elizabeth H. Bromley 1 . 2 University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom, 1 Durham University, Durham, County Durham, United Kingdom, 3 University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom, 4 University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 5 Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada, 6 Lund University, Lund, Sweden, 7 Universiteit Leiden, Leiden, Netherlands. A vast array of biological processes, in the human body and beyond, are reliant on the successful function of molecular motors. These protein-based molecular machines are involved in many fundamental cellular activities, from muscle contraction to cell division. The complexity of interactions between the amino acids which make up these proteins make them both the preferred building materials of nature, and difficult systems to fully explore. In addition to improving our knowledge of how these natural proteins perform their individual tasks, understanding and replicating these impressive abilities is highly attractive for bionanotechnology applications. One means of understanding such systems is through bottom-up design of synthetic molecular motors. Our aim is to combine coiled-coil peptide designs with other molecular components to devise and produce synthetic motors. These include the Tumbleweed, a synthetic molecular motor designed to progress via rectified diffusion along a DNA track. One design for the formation of the Tumbleweed motor is reliant on the self-assembly of orthogonal coiled coils, a peptide motif commonly found in nature. I will discuss the requirements of such a system, and the biophysical characterisation of a set of designed peptides with the ability to form a suitable structure, demonstrated using circular dichroism, dynamic light scattering, analytical ultracentrifugation and disulphide exchange reactions. Reference Bromley et al., The Tumbleweed: towards a synthetic protein motor, HFSP Journal. 2009 Jun; 3(3): 204–212

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