Synthetic Nanomachines Driven Through Metal-Ligand Exchange Reactions

这项研究的总体目标是创造几纳米大小的合成机器。把它放在一个背景下，人类头发的平均宽度大约是10,000纳米！幸运的是，制造这种大小的物体相对容易，因为这是单个小分子的领域，合成化学家(如那些制造药物的人)已经制造这些东西近200年了。然而，在这种规模下，更具挑战性的是控制运动。与我们周围的宏观世界不同，在施加作用力之前，物体保持静止不动，而分子尺度的物体受到持续随机运动的影响，这种效应被称为布朗运动。指导(和保证！)就在眼前，因为大自然已经建立了大量的纳米机器，它用于许多不同的生物过程，从细胞运输到甚至制造蛋白质。在所有这些情况下，生物纳米机器使用结构将运动限制在单一维度，这让人想起火车使用轨道向前或向后移动的方式，但从来不是左右移动。同样，我们的目标是制备一个径迹分子，并研究铂基分子片段沿它的运动。铂之所以被选中，是因为它可以同时起到胶水和润滑脂的作用(！)通过将碎片结合到轨道上，同时促进沿轨道的运动。最终，我们希望使用这种纳米机器将药物分子‘拉入’正常情况下无法进入的细胞中。

The overall aim of this research is to create synthetic machines that are a few nanometres in size. To put that into context, the average width of a human hair is about 10,000 nanometres! Fortunately, it is relatively easy to make objects of this size as this is the domain of single small molecules, and synthetic chemists (such as those which make pharmaceuticals) have been making these for nearly 200 years. However, what is significantly more challenging at this scale is controlling motion. In contrast to the macroscopic world around us where objects remain stationary until a force is applied, molecular scale objects are subject to constantly random movement, an effect known as Brownian motion. Guidance (and reassurance!) is at hand, as Nature has built up a vast array of nanomachines it uses for lots of different biological processes from cellular transport to even making proteins. In all of these cases, biological nanomachines use architectures to restrict motion to a single dimension, reminiscent of the way a train uses a track to go forward or backward, but never side to side. Similarly, we aim to prepare a track molecule and investigate the motion of a platinum-based molecular fragment along it. Platinum has been chosen as it can simultaneously act as both a glue and grease (!) by binding the fragment to the track whilst facilitating motion along it. Eventually we would like to use such nanomachines to 'pull' drug molecules into cells that normally would not be able to enter.