Researchers from the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences (IOCB Prague) built a 2-dimensional organized array of light-driven molecular motors. At the molecular level, they have created a system of regularly spaced microscopic machines rotating when illuminated. The team headed by Dr. Jiří Kaleta (Prof. Josef Michl Group) collaborated with the 2016 Nobel laureate in chemistry Prof. Ben Feringa. Their research was published in the prestigious Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS).

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Development of molecular motors is still in its early days and in the basic research realm, but it is clear that it has a great potential and is drawing a great deal of attention, as illustrated by the 2016 Nobel prize in chemistry awarded for the research in this field. The discovery by the IOCB Prague team and their colleagues shows how to move away from manipulating with individual motors to organized arrays of millions or billions of units with dramatically increased impact. This will enable us to study motors more conveniently and in an appropriately designed system could eventually lead to the transport of microscopic objects along the surface with the use of just light as a trigger and fuel of the process, CzechInvest government agency writes.