Among the amazing variety of ingenious molecular machines present in living organisms, enabling motility, responsiveness, and out-of-equilibrium behavior among others, rotary motors, such as the ATPase and bacterial flagellar motors, hold a special position. While these biological machines are mainly powered by chemical conversion and artificial light-driven rotary molecular motors have been well established, genuine chemically driven rotary motor systems are very limited. Here, we report a chemically powered rotary molecular motor based on biaryl structures that allows complete 360° unidirectional rotation i.e., >99% based on simple esterification chemistry. All the stereoisomers involved in the 4-stage rotary process have been characterized using X-ray crystallography confirming the relative stereochemistry of each isomer in accordance with the sequential and complete stereoselective operation of the rotary system. Having established the basic principles of this novel molecular rotary motor, it will facilitate the design of more sophisticated future artificial machine systems driven solely by chemical energy.

在活生物体中存在的各种令人惊奇的巧妙分子机器中，它们具有运动性，响应性和不平衡行为，其中，旋转马达（例如ATPase和细菌鞭毛马达）占据着特殊的位置。虽然这些生物机器主要由化学转化提供动力，并且已经很好地建立了人造光驱动的旋转分子电动机，但是真正的化学驱动的旋转电动机系统非常有限。在这里，我们报告了一种基于联芳基结构的化学驱动的旋转分子电动机，该电动机可以完成360°单向旋转，即基于简单的酯化化学反应，大于99％。使用X射线晶体学对4阶段旋转过程中涉及的所有立体异构体进行了表征，从而证实了根据旋转系统的顺序和完全立体选择操作，每个异构体的相对立体化学。建立了这种新型分子旋转电动机的基本原理后，它将有助于设计更复杂的未来仅由化学能驱动的人造机器系统。