Nano-car by Ben Feringa

Is it art? Is it a climbing frame? No, this is a nano-car! The “work of art” is a greatly enlarged version of the four-wheel-drive car that was built on a molecular scale in 2011 under the direction of RUG professor Ben Feringa. In reality, the entire structure is no more than a few millionths of a millimeter in size.

The building blocks for this car are the molecular motors Ben Feringa discovered in 1999, which earned him a shared Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2016. Attaching four of these motors to a “chassis” created a mini-car that can drive across a surface using electricity. This little car cannot carry cargo, but perhaps that will change; doctors could use such nano-cars as a “delivery service” for drugs in patients' bodies.

This large version of the nano-car was commissioned by Groningen City Marketing in 2016 to celebrate Feringa's Nobel Prize. It first stood on the Grote Markt, but later moved to the Zernike Campus.

You can read more about the molecular motors that brought Feringa the Nobel Prize elsewhere on our website. In the Feringa Building on the Zernike Campus, you can see a continuous presentation about Ben Feringa's Nobel Prize on two information screens in September.

Want to take a look at Ben's study and lab? Then visit this page.

The scientific paper on the nano-car was published in the journal Nature , in 2011