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Updated: Jul 23, 2025

Construction and Operation of a Light-driven Gold Nanorod Rotary Motor System
Published on: June 30, 2018
Ion-Powered Rotary Motors: Where Did They Come from and Where They Are Going?
Vibhuti Nandel1, Jacob Scadden1, Matthew A B Baker1
1School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences (BABS), University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2033, Australia.
Abstract:
Molecular motors are found in many living organisms. One such molecular machine, the ion-powered rotary motor (IRM), requires the movement of ions across a membrane against a concentration gradient to drive rotational movement. The bacterial flagellar motor (BFM) is an example of an IRM which relies on ion movement through the stator proteins to generate the rotation of the flagella. There are many ions which can be used by the BFM stators to power motility and different ions can be used by a single bacterium expressing multiple stator variants. The use of ancestral sequence reconstruction (ASR) and functional analysis of reconstructed stators shows promise for understanding how these proteins evolved and when the divergence in ion use may have occurred. In this review, we discuss extant BFM stators and the ions that power them as well as recent examples of the use of ASR to study ion-channel selectivity and how this might be applied to further study of the BFM stator complex.
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