Background to Project

Mol Switch is both an ambitious and exciting project.  The long-term aim is to provide a mechanism for enabling biological systems (i.e. muscle) to operate silicon, or computer-based, artificial devices such as prosthetics.  This is the link between the Biological and Silicon Worlds that is mentioned in the Project title.  The means for accomplishing this is through a device based around a biological molecular motor, acting as a molecular dynamo (Figure 1).

Figure 1     The Mol Switch  'device'

Despite this high level of ambition, during the first year of the Project we have clearly demonstrated such a device can be assembled.  This is the first demonstration of DNA movement by single-molecules of the proposed type of molecular motor we propose to use – Type I Restriction-Modification (R-M) enzymes.  The equipment used to make these single-molecule measurements is a Magnetic Tweezer set-up and it was the availability of this equipment, within the Mol Switch Consortium, that made these measurements possible.  We have shown single molecular motor molecules can pull DNA carrying a magnetic bead and that the forces involved can be measured, together with the speed of the movement.  The next stage of the Project is to show that such systems can self-assemble into a useful device.

The Mol Switch Project set out to produce a biological molecular motor that can ‘pull’ a ‘string’ through itself, acting as a nanoactuator.  Attached to one end of the ‘string’ is a magnetic bead, whose movement can easily be detected and which is now acting as a molecular dynamo.  The ‘string’ being used is, in fact, DNA (a nanometre wide thread), which also allows us to attach, with ease, the magnetic particle to the other end of the string (a routine situation in molecular biology).  The starting point for this project, was to make use of the molecular motor EcoR124I (Firman and Szczelkun, 2000) .

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