Discovering nanomachines within living organisms: Cytochromes P450 unleashed as living soft robots

Phys.org  August 7, 2023 An international team of researchers (Israel, India) addressed the difference between regular 3D matter and the nanomachines in ‘living matters’ (e.g., the CYP450 enzymes), which oxidize an array of essential substrate molecules. Molecular dynamics simulations revealed that, unlike 3D materials, CYP450s are 4D nanomachines, in which the fourth dimension was a sensing mechanism whereby the protein responds to an initial stimulus of substrate entrance and performs an autonomous chain of events (the catalytic cycle), which leads to substrate oxidation. They found that stimulus was the binding of a substrate molecule that eventually underwent oxidation in a […]