Department of Physics , University of California, San Diego , La Jolla , California 92093 , United States.
Department of Physics , Simon Fraser University , Burnaby , British Columbia V5A 1S6 , Canada.
Chem Rev. 2020 Jan 8;120(1):434-459. doi: 10.1021/acs.chemrev.9b00254. Epub 2019 Aug 14.
Biomolecular machines are protein complexes that convert between different forms of free energy. They are utilized in nature to accomplish many cellular tasks. As isothermal nonequilibrium stochastic objects at low Reynolds number, they face a distinct set of challenges compared with more familiar human-engineered macroscopic machines. Here we review central questions in their performance as free energy transducers, outline theoretical and modeling approaches to understand these questions, identify both physical limits on their operational characteristics and design principles for improving performance, and discuss emerging areas of research.
生物分子机器是将自由能转化为不同形式的蛋白质复合物。它们在自然界中被用来完成许多细胞任务。作为低雷诺数下的等温非平衡随机物体，与更为人熟悉的人类设计的宏观机器相比，它们面临着一系列独特的挑战。在这里，我们回顾了它们作为自由能转换器的性能中的核心问题，概述了理解这些问题的理论和建模方法，确定了它们的操作特性的物理限制和提高性能的设计原则，并讨论了新兴的研究领域。
