Right hand in a trench coat

I hope you like things because I like things.
jtotheizzoe: rajvagyok: Animation of MarkIII(k), one of the molecular machines designed by K. Erik Drexler and Nanorex, Inc., categorized as “nanoscale planetary gear.” Working on a post about a molecular machine that has the potential to change the way we study biology, so it’s only fitting that I come across this molecular gearbox on my dashboard. Even though these are just simulations and haven’t been built, there’s no purely chemical reason that they couldn’t. Lots more cool machines to look at in this gallery. Soon to be featured in the tiniest transmission ever created. I assume something like this is being made as a sort of flagellin analogue. In and of itself the idea is really cool, but totally the sort of thing that’s dreamed up in the realm of computational chemists –- who don’t understand synthesis at all. There’s no ‘purely chemical’ reason this couldn’t be done, but nobody (wise) would do it because 1) the syntheses of the components here are incredibly complex, 2) the yields would be absurdly low.  There’s no way this thing would self-assemble into the assembly (assuming of a two-piece construction). The fit between the interior piece and exterior piece is far too tight — the optimal host-guest interaction is found when the guest occupies ~60% of the available host cavity. This isn’t going to self-assemble based solely with the help of entropy (i.e. the fit is correct), and based on the structure there doesn’t look to be any sort of ionic interactions that are guiding the assembly process. If it’s a single molecule, the synthesis would be essentially impossible; there’s an absurd number of heteroatomsand way too many stereoisomers for this thing to be made on any reasonable scale (for reference, James Tour’s nano-dragsters — made almost entirely of carbon using well-known coupling reactions — were made with a very low overall yield; the current synthetic molecular motors are orders of magnitude smaller than this proposed beast — and again are almost entirely made of carbon). It’s never a bad thing to dream things up, but it’d help if they had some sort of basis in reality — which requires better cross-communication between fields. I will now return to putting up pictures of puppies and/or pizza.

jtotheizzoe:

rajvagyok:

Animation of MarkIII(k), one of the molecular machines designed by K. Erik Drexler and Nanorex, Inc., categorized as “nanoscale planetary gear.”

Working on a post about a molecular machine that has the potential to change the way we study biology, so it’s only fitting that I come across this molecular gearbox on my dashboard. Even though these are just simulations and haven’t been built, there’s no purely chemical reason that they couldn’t.

Lots more cool machines to look at in this gallery. Soon to be featured in the tiniest transmission ever created.

I assume something like this is being made as a sort of flagellin analogue. In and of itself the idea is really cool, but totally the sort of thing that’s dreamed up in the realm of computational chemists –- who don’t understand synthesis at all. There’s no ‘purely chemical’ reason this couldn’t be done, but nobody (wise) would do it because 1) the syntheses of the components here are incredibly complex, 2) the yields would be absurdly low. 

There’s no way this thing would self-assemble into the assembly (assuming of a two-piece construction). The fit between the interior piece and exterior piece is far too tight — the optimal host-guest interaction is found when the guest occupies ~60% of the available host cavity. This isn’t going to self-assemble based solely with the help of entropy (i.e. the fit is correct), and based on the structure there doesn’t look to be any sort of ionic interactions that are guiding the assembly process.

If it’s a single molecule, the synthesis would be essentially impossible; there’s an absurd number of heteroatomsand way too many stereoisomers for this thing to be made on any reasonable scale (for reference, James Tour’s nano-dragsters — made almost entirely of carbon using well-known coupling reactions — were made with a very low overall yield; the current synthetic molecular motors are orders of magnitude smaller than this proposed beast — and again are almost entirely made of carbon).

It’s never a bad thing to dream things up, but it’d help if they had some sort of basis in reality — which requires better cross-communication between fields.

I will now return to putting up pictures of puppies and/or pizza.

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