A single-molecule submarine has been built by a team at Texas' Rice University, and the teeny tiny submersible powered by ultraviolet light comprises the fastest moving molecules ever seen.
The 244-atom submarine,
which was featured earlier this month in the American Chemical Society's journal Nano Letters, moves with a motor that operates like a propeller, similar to a bacterium's flagellum, the
Rice University team led by chemist James Tour said in a statement.
The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Welch Foundation, and North Carolina State.
"With each full revolution, the motor's tail-like propeller moves the sub forward 18 nanometers," Rice's statement said. "And with the motors running at more than a million RPM, that translates into speed. Though the sub's top speed amounts to less than one inch per second, Tour said that's a breakneck pace on the molecular scale."
The statement compared the discovery to the 1966 Academy Award-winning movie "Fantastic Voyage," in which a crew and a submarine were reduced to microscopic size to help save a scientist who was nearly assassinated.
"These are the fastest-moving molecules ever seen in solution," Tour said in the Rice statement.
According to the website Semiconductor Engineering, the Rice University nano-sub's motor was created using a 20-step chemical process, and it completes each revolution in four steps. This technology proves that nano-subs can navigate through solutions.
"One of the challenges was arming the motors with the appropriate fluorophores for tracking without altering the fast rotation," Victor García-López, a Rice graduate student and the study's lead author, said in the university statement.
García-López said that Gufeng Wang at North Carolina State University helped his team at Rice measure how well the nano-subs moved and contributed to improving the sub's movements.
"There's a path forward," García-López said. "This is the first step, and we've proven the concept. Now we need to explore opportunities and potential applications."
Researchers at Rice said that the nano-subs could be used to deliver cargoes for medical and other purposes in the future.