What they are and what they are the molecular machines – Clarín.com

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded this year jointly to the French Jean-Pierre Sauvage, the british Sir J. Fraser Stoddart and the Dutch Bernard L. Feringa for the design and synthesis of molecular machines, announced today the Academy of Sciences of Sweden in Stockholm.

The winners developed the smaller machines in the world, a thousand times smaller than the diameter of a hair that can be used to develop new materials, sensors and systems of storage of energy, said the Academy.

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they did So thanks to its development of molecules with controllable movements that can perform tasks when they are added energy.

the development of computing shows how the miniaturization of technology can produce a revolution, and the Nobel prize in Chemistry this year miniaturizaron machines and took chemistry to a new dimension, added to the Academy of Sciences of Sweden.

The first steps towards the creation of molecular machines and gave Jean-Pierre Sauvage in 1983, when managed to link the two circular molecules to form a chain called catenano, explained to the news agency DPA..

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The glue that was used for the construction of these structures in the form of a string was a ion of copper, says the Spanish newspaper The World. Then, the ion of copper is removed and the links are bonded by mechanical, not chemical, and can move with freedom in what, in the field of chemistry have been called Catenano.

The scottish Fraser Stoddart went to the next level in 1991, to develop a rotaxane, a molecular architecture mechanically interlocked which consists of a molecule with the shape of a dumbbell in the ring to molecular was able to move along the axis formed by another molecule elongated.

This discovery led to the development of a kind of lift molecular, a muscle-molecular and a computer chip based on molecules.

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it Was the first molecular motor designed by man. Obviously all these machines lacked a key element: energy. Stoddart and his team succeeded in soon control your craving the movement caused by a heat source on the rotaxane.

Finally, in 1999, Bernard Feringa was the first who developed a molecular motor that rotated continuously in one direction. The researcher of the University of Groningen managed to rotate with molecular motors a cylinder of glass 10,000 times greater than these. In addition, in 2011 he designed a kind of nanocoche with four wheels.

Feringa stated that the possibilities for the future are endless, unknown, unimaginable even.

According to Sara Linse, of the Academy of Sciences of Sweden, with these discoveries open the door to the design of smart materials, able to change their form, their properties or their functions depending on the tissue to which it is to join, or the chemical signals that are sent to them.

“The dream is to design robots tiny that can be injected into a tissue and introduce drugs in a certain cell, or detecting cancer cells, for example, but there are many other fields of work, such as intelligent materials”, explained Ben Feringa, one of the winners during a telephone connection with the Committee of the Nobel peace prize and the press.