Molecular Imaging and Photonics, Department of Chemistry, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven , 3000 Leuven, Belgium.
Institute of Physics, Faculty of Physics, Astronomy and Informatics, Nicolaus Copernicus University , Grudziadzka 5, 87-100 Torun, Poland.
J Am Chem Soc. 2017 May 31;139(21):7156-7159. doi: 10.1021/jacs.7b02758. Epub 2017 May 18.
Synthetic molecular motors continue to attract great interest due to their ability to transduce energy into nanomechanical motion, the potential to do work and drive systems out-of-equilibrium. Of particular interest are unidirectional rotary molecular motors driven by chemical fuel or light. Probing the mechanistic details of their operation at the single-molecule level is hampered by the diffraction limit, which prevents the collection of dynamic positional information by traditional optical methods. Here, we use defocused wide-field imaging to examine the unidirectional rotation of individual molecular rotary motors on a quartz surface in unprecedented detail. The sequential occupation of nanomechanical states during the UV and heat-induced cycle of rotation are directly imaged in real-time. The approach will undoubtedly prove important in elucidating the mechanistic details and assessing the utility of novel synthetic molecular motors in the future.
由于能够将能量转化为纳米机械运动、进行做功以及驱动非平衡系统，合成分子马达继续引起人们的极大兴趣。特别引人关注的是由化学燃料或光驱动的单向旋转分子马达。通过传统的光学方法来探测其在单分子水平上的机械细节操作受到了衍射极限的阻碍，这使得动态位置信息无法被收集。在这里，我们使用离焦广角成像技术以前所未有的细节检查了单个分子旋转马达在石英表面上的单向旋转。在紫外线和热诱导的旋转循环过程中，纳米机械状态的顺序占据被实时直接成像。这种方法无疑将在阐明机械细节和评估新型合成分子马达未来的实用性方面证明是重要的。
