Chemical and structural transformations have long been carried out by milling. Such mechanochemical steps are now ubiquitous in a number of industries (such as the pharmaceutical, chemical and metallurgical industries), and are emerging as excellent environmentally friendly alternatives to solution-based syntheses. However, mechanochemical transformations are typically difficult to monitor in r...

Kinesins and myosins hydrolyze ATP, producing force that drives spindle assembly, vesicle transport and muscle contraction. How do motors do this? Here we discuss mechanisms of motor force transduction, based on their mechanochemical cycles and conformational changes observed in crystal structures. Distortion or twisting of the central β-sheet - proposed to trigger actin-induced Pi and ADP rele...

Brominated organic pollutants are considered of great concern for their adverse effect on human health and the environment, so an increasing number of such compounds are being classified as persistent organic pollutants (POPs). Mechanochemical destruction is a promising technology for POPs safe disposal because it can achieve their complete carbonization by solvent-free high energy ball milling...

The GTPase dynamin is a mechanochemical enzyme involved in membrane fission, but the molecular nature of its membrane interactions and their regulation by guanine nucleotides and protein effectors remain poorly characterized. Using site-directed fluorescence labeling and several independent fluorescence spectroscopic techniques, we have developed robust assays for the detection and real-time mo...

Silver, Frederick H., Dale DeVore, and Lorraine M. Siperko. Invited Review: Role of mechanophysiology in aging of ECM: effects of changes in mechanochemical transduction. J Appl Physiol 95: 2134–2141, 2003; 10.1152/japplphysiol.00429.2003.—Mechanical forces play a role in the development and evolution of extracellular matrices (ECMs) found in connective tissue. Gravitational forces acting on ma...

Regarding the activation of chemical reactions, today’s chemist is used to thinking in terms of thermochemistry, electrochemistry, and photochemistry, which is reflected in the organization and content of the standard physical chemistry textbooks. The fourth way of chemical activation, mechanochemistry, is usually less well-known. The purpose of the present review is to give a survey of the cla...

In cells, helicase translocation along nucleic acid is essential for many biological processes. However, so far, the mechanism of this translocation is not fully understood. Recent studies show that helicase might translocate through two processes, active process and passive process, with different translocation rate. In this study, a mechanochemical model including such two processes is presen...

A rigorous numerical test of a hypothetical mechanism of a molecular motor should model explicitly the diffusive motion of the motor's degrees of freedom as well as the transition rates between the motor's chemical states. We present such a Brownian dynamics, mechanochemcial model of the coarse-grain structure of the dimeric, linear motor myosin V. Compared with run-length data, our model provi...

The performance of new sensors or advanced electrochemical energy storage devices strongly depends on the active materials chosen to realize such systems. In particular, their morphology may greatly influence their overall macroscopic properties. Frequently, limitations in classical ways of chemical preparation routes hamper the development of materials with tailored properties. Fortunately, su...

Mechanochemical methods offer unprecedented academic and industrial opportunities for solvent-free synthesis of novel materials. The need to study mechanochemical mechanisms is growing, and has led to the development of real-time in situ X-ray powder diffraction techniques (RI-XRPD). However, despite the power of RI-XRPD methods, there remain immense challenges. In the present contribution, man...