A team of researchers has uncovered a novel way that molecules can interact non-reciprocally without external forces, through a mechanism involving kinetic asymmetry. This discovery challenges traditional views on molecular interactions and could have profound implications for understanding life’s evolution and designing molecular machines.
Scientists have found that molecules can interact in a non-reciprocal manner without external forces, a discovery that could change our understanding of molecular interactions and the evolution of life.
Researchers from the University of Maine and Penn State discovered that molecules experience non-reciprocal interactions without external forces.
Fundamental forces such as gravity and electromagnetism are reciprocal, where two objects are attracted to each other or are repelled by each other. In our everyday experience, however, interactions don’t seem to follow this reciprocal law. For example, a predator is attracted to prey, but the prey tends to flee from the predator. Such non-reciprocal interactions are essential for complex behavior associated with living organisms.
For microscopic systems such as bacteria, the mechanism of non-reciprocal interactions has been explained by hydrodynamic or other external forces, and it was previously thought that similar types of forces could explain interactions between single molecules.
In work published in the prestigious Cell Press journal Chem, UMaine theoretical physicist R. Dean Astumian and collaborators Ayusman Sen and Niladri Sekhar Mandal at Penn State have published a different mechanism by which single molecules can interact non-reciprocally without hydrodynamic effects.
This mechanism invokes the local gradients of reactants and products due to the reactions facilitated by every chemical catalyst, a biological example of which is an enzyme. Because the response of a catalyst to the gradient depends on the catalyst’s properties, it is possible to have a situation in which one molecule is repelled by, but attracts, another molecule.
It is clear that this discovery challenges traditional views on molecular interactions and could have profound implications for understanding life’s evolution and designing molecular machines. The study sheds light on the surprising phenomenon of kinetic asymmetry and its potential impact on various fields, including chemical biology and molecular physics.
