{"id":223005,"date":"2025-10-07T03:28:19","date_gmt":"2025-10-07T08:28:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/how-a-molecular-motor-minimizes-energy-waste"},"modified":"2025-10-07T03:28:19","modified_gmt":"2025-10-07T08:28:19","slug":"how-a-molecular-motor-minimizes-energy-waste","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/how-a-molecular-motor-minimizes-energy-waste","title":{"rendered":"How a Molecular Motor Minimizes Energy Waste"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"padding-right: 20px\"><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/how-a-molecular-motor-minimizes-energy-waste.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Turning a biologically important molecular motor at a constant rate saves energy, according to experiments.<\/p>\n<p>Within every biological cell is an enzyme, called adenosine triphosphate (ATP) synthase, that churns out energy-rich molecules for fueling the cell\u2019s activity. New experiments investigate the functioning of this \u201cenergy factory\u201d by artificially cranking one of the enzyme\u2019s molecular motors [<a href=\"https:\/\/physics.aps.org\/articles\/v18\/167#c1\">1<\/a>]. The results suggest that maintaining a fixed rotation rate minimizes energy waste caused by microscopic fluctuations. Future work could confirm the role of efficiency in the evolutionary design of biological motors.<\/p>\n<p>ATP synthase consists of two rotating molecular motors, F<sub>o<\/sub> and F<sub>1<\/sub>, that are oriented along a common rotation axis and locked together so that the rotation of F<sub>o<\/sub> exerts a torque on the shaft in the middle of F<sub>1<\/sub>. The resulting motion within F<sub>1<\/sub> helps bring together the chemical ingredients of the molecule ATP, which stores energy that can later be used in cellular processes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Turning a biologically important molecular motor at a constant rate saves energy, according to experiments. Within every biological cell is an enzyme, called adenosine triphosphate (ATP) synthase, that churns out energy-rich molecules for fueling the cell\u2019s activity. New experiments investigate the functioning of this \u201cenergy factory\u201d by artificially cranking one of the enzyme\u2019s molecular motors [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,19,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-223005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biological","category-chemistry","category-nanotechnology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223005"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223005\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}