TEASER FOR THE LECTURES

Engineering with molecular motors, Heiner Linke

Protein-based molecular motors are ubiquitous in biology where they play central roles in essentially all cellular processes. In this colloquium, I will present two major projects concerning the engineering of, and with, protein based molecular motors.

First, I will report the status of an international effort to create an artificial, protein-based motor. Using the same material system (proteins) as biology is a high-risk, high gain effort. On the one hand, due to its complexity, it is still very difficult to design a protein with specific functions from the bottom up. On the other hand, the exquisite variety and performance (e.g. an almost ideal energy efficiency) of biological motors shows that a high degree of engineering excellence can be achieved in principle. I will report on the design and construction of “Tumbleweed”, a protein assembly designed to move along a DNA track, powered by externally controlled changes in ligand concentrations that control binding and unbinding between Tumbleweed and track.

Second, I will describe a major EU project, Bio4Comp, to use biological molecular motors to build a highly energy efficient, parallel computer. Electronic computers are extremely powerful at performing a high number of operations at very high speeds, sequentially. However, they struggle with combinatorial tasks that can be solved faster if many operations are performed in parallel. We have presented proof-of-concept of a molecular-motor based parallel computer by solving the specific instance of a classical nondeterministic-polynomial-time complete (“NP-complete”) problem, the subset sum problem. The computer consists of a specifically designed, nanostructured network explored by a large number of molecular-motor-driven, protein filaments. This system is highly energy efficient, thus avoiding the heating issues limiting electronic computers. I will discuss which other problems we can solve, the technical advances necessary to solve larger combinatorial problems than existing computation devices, as well as the  relation to quantum computation.

Nicolau, D. V et al. (2016). Parallel computation with molecular-motor-propelled agents in nanofabricated networks. PNAS, 1132591–2596 (2016).

http://bio4comp.org/

From birds to molecules and beyond: the dawn of quantum biology, Ilia A. Solov’yov

Clearly, the laws of physics hold and are exploited in living organisms. Speaking as a physicist, most biological characteristics stem from the laws of classical physics that students learn in their first year. However, crucial characteristics in organisms are governed by quantum physics. The latter characteristics are those in which biological processes involve the jumps of electrons from one state to another: electrons are exemplary quantum particles. The quantum behavior of electrons cover all chemical transformations, for example in case of formation or breaking of chemical bonds, but it arises also in optical transitions induced through light absorption by biomolecules.

In this talk I will discuss a fascinating example of quantum behavior in biology as it comes about in animal navigation. In the case of animal navigation, quantum effects apparently bring about a magnetic compass that can sense the geomagnetic field through its interactions of biomolecules despite the fact the interaction energy amounts to only a tiny fraction of thermal energy present at body temperature. Magnetoreception case study will then be used to define the emerging interdisciplinary field of quantum biology.