Peptide–Metal Organic Framework Swimmers that Direct the Motion toward Chemical Targets

Highly efficient and robust chemical motors are expected for the application in microbots that can selectively swim toward targets and accomplish their tasks in sensing, labeling, and delivering. However, one of major issues for such development is that current artificial swimmers have difficulty controlling their directional motion toward targets like bacterial chemotaxis. To program synthetic motors with sensing capability for the target-directed motion, we need to develop swimmers whose motions are sensitive to chemical gradients in environments. Here we create a new intelligent biochemical swimmer by integrating metal organic frameworks (MOFs) and peptides that can sense toxic heavy metals in solution and swim toward the targets. With the aid of Pb-binding enzymes, the peptide-MOF motor can directionally swim toward PbSe quantum dots (QD) by sensing pH gradient and eventually complete the motion as the swimmer reaches the highest gradient point at the target position in solution. This type of technology could be evolved to miniaturize chemical robotic systems that sense target chemicals and swim toward target locations.