Journal of the American Chemical Society
Journal of the American Chemical Society
4 years ago

Defocused Imaging of UV-Driven Surface-Bound Molecular Motors

Defocused Imaging of UV-Driven Surface-Bound Molecular Motors
Ben L. Feringa, Johan Hofkens, Bartosz Krajnik, Matthew A. Watson, Jiawen Chen, Scott L. Cockroft
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.

Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/jacs.7b02758

DOI: 10.1021/jacs.7b02758

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