Over the past decades, chemists have been pursuing the creation of man-made molecular machines with either designed engineering-like operations or with higher performances compared with biological machines. The promise of creating an artificial molecular world traces its origins in the well-known lecture of Richard Feynman, There’s plenty of room at the bottom (1). Feynman’s insights into the immense possibilities of such small artificial machines, assembled in a straightforward manner, were deeply inspiring for the scientific community. The design of machines on the molecular scale is not an easy task to accomplish. Instead of gravity and inertia, which are omnipresent in the macroscopic world, random thermal fluctuations are prevalent and dominate movements on the molecular scale. Two main approaches are being considered for the construction of artificial molecular machines (AMMs): namely, bio-inspiration and miniaturization. The former consists of integrating concepts from naturally occurring machines and unnatural building blocks into AMMs, while the latter involves engineering nano-devices based on the mechanical actions of macroscopic machines. Perhaps a better way to design AMMs with unprecedented functions would be to follow neither of these routes, but rather to construct molecularly precise architectures based on recent advances in supramolecular chemistry: explore what has not been built by Nature. This unnatural route would only share with the biological world its fundamental laws at small scales, but differentiates it from its working processes.

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不断增长的人工分子机械师社区[介绍]

在过去的几十年中，化学家一直在追求人造分子机器的创建，这些分子机器要么设计成类似于工程的操作，要么具有比生物机器更高的性能。创建人工分子世界的希望可以追溯到其起源于理查德·费曼（Richard Feynman）的著名演讲，底部有足够的空间（1）。费曼对以简单方式组装的这种小型人造机器的巨大可能性的见识对科学界产生了深远的启发。在分子规模上设计机器并非易事。代替了宏观世界中无处不在的重力和惯性，随机的热波动是普遍的，并且在分子尺度上占主导地位。正在考虑采用两种主要方法来构建人工分子机器（AMM）：生物启发和小型化。前者包括将来自自然发生的机器和不自然的构造块的概念集成到AMM中，而后者则涉及基于宏观机器的机械作用来工程化纳米设备。设计具有空前功能的AMM的更好方法可能是不遵循这些方法，而是根据超分子化学的最新进展来构建分子精确的体系结构：探索Nature尚未建立的结构。这条不自然的路线只会与生物界分享其小范围的基本规律，而使其与工作过程有所不同。