Plant power
Plants are not generally known for their motility, but in this month's Nature Materials, Michael Knoblauch and colleagues show that an assembly of proteins extracted from leguminous plants can act as a kind of primitive muscle. Remarkably, ATP is not needed — meaning that the proteins do not depend on a highly specific chemical environment to function. Small pH changes or changes in the concentration of calcium ions are all that is needed to make the assembly contract or expand. In a related News and Views article, Constantinos Mavroidis and Atul Dubey discuss the potential of this macroscopic protein assembly as a micromotor.
letters
ATP-independent contractile proteins from plants
M. KNOBLAUCH et al.
Nature Materials 2, 600; September 2003
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news and views
From pulses to motors
C. MAVROIDIS AND A. DUBEY
Nature Materials 2, 573; September 2003
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