Abstract: Molecular assembly is an important frontier research in chemistry, physics, biology and material. Biomolecular motors are natural molecular machines that exist in nearly all the biological systems. These biomolecular motors play crucial roles in life activities and participate in a series of important life activities such as intracellular transport, energy transfer and muscle contraction and so on. Rotating molecular motor ATP synthase is one of the most studied biomolecular machines. The recombination of ATP synthase in vitro not only helps to better understand its working mechanism in biological processes, but also promotes the development of biomolecular motor-based devices and synthetic molecular motors. In this paper, we mainly introduce our latest progress on the design and construction of ATP synthase-based biomimetic system. Inspired by photophosphorylation in plants, we fabricated a series of light-responsive ATP synthesis systems by co-assembling ATP synthase and photosystem Ⅱ (PSⅡ) within layer-by-layer assembled cell-like structures. These systems effectively simulated the transformation process from light energy to biological energy in natural photosynthesis. Besides, we also constructed artificial hybrid chloroplasts by introducing functional components into natural chloroplasts. Compared to natural chloroplasts, these hybrid chloroplasts showed remarkable improvement of photophosphorylation efficiency for ATP synthesis. These composite assemblies well simulate the chemical reaction process of photosynthesis in nature, and provide a new way for the effective utilization of light.

Key words: biomolecular machine, ATP synthase, photosystem II, photoacid generator, quantum dot, Layer-by-Layer, microsphere, multilayer