Gliding of microtubule filaments on surfaces coated with the motor protein kinesin has potential applications for nano-scale devices. The ability to guide the gliding direction in three dimensions allows the fabrication of tracks of arbitrary geometry in space. Here, we achieve this by using kinesin-coated glass wires of micrometer diameter range. Unlike previous methods in which the guiding tracks are fixed on flat two-dimensional surfaces, the flexibility of glass wires in shape and size facilitates building in-vitro devices that have deformable tracks.
@article{arxiv.1402.4917,
title = {Microtubule shuttles on kinesin-coated glass micro-wire tracks},
author = {Kyongwan Kim and Andrew L. Liao and Aurelien Sikora and Daniel Oliveira and Hikaru Nakazawa and Mitsuo Umetsu and Izumi Kumagai and Tadafumi Adschiri and Wonmuk Hwangb and Winfried Teizer},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1402.4917},
year = {2014}
}