Assembling Life's Molecular Motor
Monday, May 15, 2017 - 15:41
in Physics & Chemistry
As part of a project dedicated to modeling how single-celled purple bacteria turn light into food, a team of computational scientists from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) simulated a complete ATP synthase in all-atom detail. The work builds on the project's first phase--a 100-million atom photosynthetic organelle called a chromatophore--and gives scientists an unprecedented glimpse into a biological machine whose energy efficiency far surpasses that of any artificial system.