Abstract
Micro/nanomotors (MNMs) are tiny motorized objects that can autonomously navigate in complex fluidic environments under the influence of an appropriate source of energy. Internal energy-driven MNMs are composed of certain reactive materials that are capable of converting chemical energy from the surroundings into kinetic energy. Recent advances in smart nanomaterials design and processing have endowed the internal energy-driven MNMs with different geometrical designs and various mechanisms of locomotion, with remarkable traveling speed in diverse environments ranging from environmental water to complex body fluids. Among the different design principals, MNM systems that operate from biocatalysis possess biofriendly components, efficient energy conversion, and mild working condition, exhibiting a potential of stepping out of the proof-of-concept phase for addressing many real-life environmental and biotechnological challenges. The biofriendliness of MNMs should not only be considered for in vivo drug delivery but also for environmental remediation and chemical sensing that only environmentally friendly intermediates and degraded products are generated. This review aims to provide an overview of the recent advances in biofriendly MNM design using biocatalysis as the predominant driving force, towards practical applications in biotechnology and environmental technology.
Highlights
Inspired by the diverse molecular motors in nature (Cross 1997; Thomas and Thornhill 1998), recent rapid explosion of materials research and nanotechnology allowed us to explore the potential of artificial micro/nanomotor (MNM) systems for numerous applications (Fernandez-Medina et al 2020)
The recent development of MNMs has been extensively documented in several reviews, with the majority being focused on the composition, motion mechanism or applications (Sun et al 2019), here we provide an overarching perspective on MNMs utilizing biocatalysis as the driving force, with a special focus on their biocompatibility in both biological system and the natural environment
One of the major challenges remained for real-world application is the compatibility of MNMs with the biological system and the natural environment
Summary
Inspired by the diverse molecular motors in nature (Cross 1997; Thomas and Thornhill 1998), recent rapid explosion of materials research and nanotechnology allowed us to explore the potential of artificial micro/nanomotor (MNM) systems for numerous applications (Fernandez-Medina et al 2020). MNM systems present unique properties including controllable motion (Arque et al 2019), high cargo loading efficiency (Ma et al 2017), strong towing force (Sanchez et al 2010), and ease of surface functionalization (Restrepo-Perez et al 2014). Multifarious demonstrations and applications have been developed by exploiting their material tunability (Jurado-Sanchez et al 2017; Ning et al 2018; Wang et al 2016), sensing capabilities (Jurado-Sanchez 2018; Jurado-Sanchez and Escarpa 2017) and controllability (Eskandarloo et al 2017) for cargo transportation (Ma et al 2015), environmental remediation (Jurado-Sanchez and Wang 2018; Vilela et al 2016; Ying et al 2019) and drug delivery (Guo et al 2019). A significant amount of MNMs reported to date have focused on the motion manipulation mechanism with potentially environmentally hazardous metalbased catalysts regardless of the manufacturing cost or the naturally feasible working conditions, posing difficulties in the real-world applications of MNMs both in vivo and in the natural environment. The great biocompatibility of the MNMs systems is expected to play an essential role in the development of stepping out of the proof-of-concept phase for addressing many real-life environmental and biotechnological challenges
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