Last but not least, we acknowledge that the TOC image was generated with the beta version of toddGPT, an advanced AI only available @nuchemistry.bsky.social 🤖

Importantly, by showing that the Brownian information ratchet mechanism can explain power stroke engineering experiments, we informed a long-standing debate in which those experiments have been contrasted with the theory of kinetic asymmetry. Full story in the paper ;)

Our work suggests that introducing power strokes in
chemically-driven synthetic molecular motors might affect their directional bias, thus providing a practical way to alter kinetic asymmetry in Brownian information ratchets that was previously overlooked.

The change in the bias can align with what power stroke intuition would have suggested, offering a potential explanation for why the flawed power stroke mechanism can retain apparent utility when engineering directionality in specific systems.

We found a resolution perfectly consistent with the Brownian ratchet mechanism: though power strokes are formally unimportant for determining directionality, we explicitly show that practical attempts to alter a power stroke have side effects that can change the directional bias.

Here is a conundrum: chemical reaction network theory proved power strokes irrelevant for predicting molecular motor directionality. However, power strokes seem widespread in biology, and some have claimed they can tune biomotor directionality by changing power stroke magnitude 🤔

They spoil the main results of our recent Chem paper, where we show how to deal with multiple cycles and spatial separation for driven chemical reaction networks.

Here is the full paper: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

@giuliosflask.bsky.social @deanast.bsky.social