Growing community of artificial molecular machinists

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 to 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).His insights into the immense possibilities of such small artificial machines, assembled in a straightforward manner, was 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 that 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