_tcm18-11405.gif )
Microfluidic & nanofluidic technologies for chemistry, physics, biology, and bioengineering
Subscribers
Non-subscribers
- Purchase article PDF [£27 + taxes]
- Purchase article PDF member offer [£5 + taxes]
Free access
Paper
Lab Chip, 2008, 8, 1441 - 1447, DOI: 10.1039/b803585g
Setting up roadblocks for kinesin-1: mechanism for the selective speed control of cargo carrying microtubules
Till Korten and Stefan Diez
Motor-driven cytoskeletal filaments are versatile transport platforms for nanosized cargo in molecular sorting and nano-assembly devices. However, because cargo and motors share the filament lattice as a common substrate for their activity, it is important to understand the influence of cargo-loading on transport properties. By performing single-molecule stepping assays on biotinylated microtubules we found that individual kinesin-1 motors frequently stopped upon encounters with attached streptavidin molecules. Consequently, we attribute the deceleration of cargo-laden microtubules in gliding assays to an obstruction of kinesin-1 paths on the microtubule lattice rather than to
frictional
cargo-surface interactions. We propose to apply this obstacle-caused slow-down of gliding microtubules in a novel molecular detection scheme: Using a mixture of two distinct microtubule populations that each bind a different kind of protein, the presence of these proteins can be detected via speed changes in the respective microtubule populations.
RSS feed