Tethered Enzymes as Nanoscale Active Particles

Biological systems can rectify active processes into productive work using enzymes, assemblies of enzymes, and larger-scale machines made of those assemblies. We seek to recapitulate and understand the phenomena of biological self-organization from the molecular to the cellular scale in the hopes of someday recreating synthetic systems with the same astonishing properties. We present recent work on examining the ability of single urease enzymes and collections of enzymes to perform "enhanced diffusion" where they diffuse faster than expected from the Stokes Einstein relation. In a new approach, we tether the enzymes to a fluid lipid bilayer to increase their viscosity for imaging and constrain them to two dimensions. We observe enhanced diffusion of single enzymes and an increase depending on the number of enzymes complexed.