Conversion process of chemical reaction into mechanical work through solvation change.

Many systems in which the hydrolysis of ATP is finally converted into the mechanical work are known (e.g. actin-myosin motor protein system). It seems that there are various types of the conversion mechanism. In this work, we examined a possibility of conversion from chemical reaction into mechanical work due to solvation change around the reaction site by using the molecular dynamics simulation (MD) with explicit solvent model. In our model, solvent molecules, S, and a motor (colloidal particle), M, are treated as Lennard-Jones (LJ) particles. Effect of chemical reaction is taken in the system as the change of LJ potential parameter e between S and M, however the reaction site is restricted on the M. The parameter ε is switched to ε′ = 1000 ε during the reaction (Δt), Fig. (a). Averaged displacement of the motor M is shown in Fig. (b). The motor M is driven by this reaction model, however the direction and efficiency are dependent on the reaction time Δt and the thermodynamic state of the solvent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]