Motor Properties of Molecular Spiders

Abstract

Molecular spiders are synthetic molecular motors featuring multiple legs such that each leg can interact with a substrate through binding and cleavage. Experimental studies of molecular spiders suggest that the motion of the spider on both a substrate matrix [R. Pei et al., J. Amer. Chem. Soc.128, 12693 (2006)] and a two dimensional substrate track [K. Lund et al, Nature 465, 206 (2010)] is biased towards uncleaved substrates. We first investigated the origin of the spider's biased motion by using Monte Carlo simulations of bipedal spiders on a 1D track based on a realistic chemical kinetic model [L.