Professors Dinos Mavroidis and Martin Yarmush received a Phase I, six month, $75K grant from the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) for their project "Protein Based Nano-Machines for Space Applications". The goals of the project is to identify and study both computationally and experimentally novel Viral Protein Linear (VPL) motors and their use in future space nano-machines. The NIAC focuses on revolutionary concepts - specifically systems and architectures - that can have a major impact on missions of the NASA Enterprises in the time frame of 10 to 40 years in the future.