Nature has often inspired human creativity since the first human-rendered artifacts appeared some 70,000 years ago. In particular, the study of nature, at various scales of size, has led to numerous innovations in engineering.
Figure 1. Biomimicry has long been a fruitful area of discovery for engineering, with the largest strides made since the invention of the light microscope. Recent further developments in imaging technologies are now opening the field on the molecular level, and proteins should prove to be one of the most productive categories for study. With more than 53,000 structures now deposited in the Protein Data Bank, the volume of candidates is huge. What is more, many proteins have properties that verge on the “mechanical,” making them particularly useful examples for the development of new machines. Arguably, the myosin motor, shown here, is the posterchild of proteomimicry. In the power stroke, the binding of actin (blue and lavender) to myosin (red and yellow) promotes the release of nucleotide from and the conformational change in the myosin head, which in turn causes muscle to contract. (The rebinding and subsequent hydrolysis of nucleotide (ATP) causes the recovery stroke of myosin while detached from actin.) As we show later, these actions make use of and extend the engineer’s understanding of the lever principle. (Images created with the Python Molecular Viewer.)
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