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Single‐headed mode of kinesin‐5
Author(s) -
Kaseda Kuniyoshi,
Crevel Isabelle,
Hirose Keiko,
Cross Robert A
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
embo reports
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 4.584
H-Index - 184
eISSN - 1469-3178
pISSN - 1469-221X
DOI - 10.1038/embor.2008.96
Subject(s) - kinesin , processivity , microtubule , mitosis , antiparallel (mathematics) , microbiology and biotechnology , biophysics , motor protein , biology , physics , genetics , dna , dna replication , quantum mechanics , magnetic field
In most organisms, kinesin‐5 motors are essential for mitosis and meiosis, where they crosslink and slide apart the antiparallel microtubule half‐spindles. Recently, it was shown using single‐molecule optical trapping that a truncated, double‐headed human kinesin‐5 dimer can step processively along microtubules. However, processivity is limited (∼8 steps) with little coordination between the heads, raising the possibility that kinesin‐5 motors might also be able to move by a nonprocessive mechanism. To investigate this, we engineered single‐headed kinesin‐5 dimers. We show that a set of these single‐headed Eg5 dimers drive microtubule sliding at about 90% of wild‐type velocity, indicating that Eg5 can slide microtubules by a mechanism in which one head of each Eg5 head‐pair is effectively redundant. On the basis of this, we propose a muscle‐like model for Eg5‐driven microtubule sliding in spindles in which most force‐generating events are single‐headed interactions and alternate‐heads processivity is rare.