Abstract
For some past decades, the field of micro fabrication has rapidly progressed. Based on this, the concept of micro total analysis systems (μTAS) was invented aiming to scale down chemical synthesize or biochemical analysis, which were conventionally performed at a bench-top scale, to an on-chip dimension. When fluidic manipulation is scaled down to nanometer scale, conventional pressure-driven fluid manipulation becomes difficult because of large pressure drop in a fluidic channel. Nanometer scale transportation based on a novel principle is required to further miniaturize μTAS. In vivo, there is a group of proteins called motor proteins, which directly convert a chemical energy to mechanical motility. Because of autonomous and directed mobility of motors, these are expected as a nano-scale actuator in vitro. In this paper, we show a novel method for a regulated transportation of target molecules driven by kinesin and dynein on microtubules with predefined polarities by nanotracks. To achieve that, efficient aligning of microtubule polarity in nanotracks fabricated by electron beam lithography was invented and characterized. Reactive molecules carried on quantum dots were transported by kinesin and dynein on the aligned microtubules. As a result, the molecular transport by motor proteins and binding of the molecules on the microtubules are observed.
