Investigating chemotactic behaviour of two-dimensional enzyme powered nanomotors

In recent years, various studies have shown that enzyme powered nanomotors represents a burgeoning field at the interface of nanotechnology and biotechnology, offering a promising future in medical science for drug delivery and in environmental science for environmental remediation. There are different kind of nanomotors currently being studied, such as magnetic nanomotors, catalytic nanomotor, acoustic nanomotors. In this study, I have used graphene oxide (GO) as platform for fabricating nanomotors as it has lot of advantages such as high surface area, flexibility in fabrication and low cytotoxicity. A biocompatible fuel source (glucose) was used to propel these nanomotors using glucose oxidase and glucose oxidase (GOX) + catalase (CAT) immobilised systems. These two nanomotors were investigated for their chemotaxis behaviour in presence of glucose under various pH and glucose concentrations. From the experiments it was observed that GO immobilised with GOX showed positive chemotactic behaviour whereas the GO immobilised with GOX+CAT exhibited negative chemotaxis. The result provide proof that pH5 and 50mM glucose concentration condition is the superior condition for the nanomotor. In such conditions, both the nanomotors shows maximum speed and distance covered by them. Moreover, this study shows that bi-enzyme nanomotor have more activity than single enzyme nanomotor.