The relevance of neck linker docking in the motility of kinesin

TL;DR

This paper investigates the role of neck linker docking in kinesin's motility, demonstrating its critical importance for step dwell times and constraining structural parameters based on experimental data.

Contribution

It provides evidence that neck linker docking is essential for kinesin's stepping mechanism and defines structural constraints consistent with known kinesin architecture.

Findings

Neck linker docking is crucial for kinesin's processive movement.

Experimental data restricts the lengths of the neck linker and docking section.

Neck linker docking explains observed dwell times under various forces.

Abstract

Conventional kinesin is a motor protein, which is able to walk along a microtubule processively. The exact mechanism of the stepping motion and force generation of kinesin is still far from clear. In this paper we argue that neck linker docking is a crucial element of this mechanism, without which the experimentally observed dwell times of the steps could not be explained under a wide range of loading forces. We also show that the experimental data impose very strict constraints on the lengths of both the neck linker and its docking section, which are compatible with the known structure of kinesin.