MPIDS Seminar: Creation of novel molecular motors on the basis of dynein function

MPIDS Seminar

  • Datum: 30.08.2018
  • Uhrzeit: 14:15 - 15:15
  • Vortragende(r): Prof. Kazuhiro Oiwa
  • Advanced ICT Research Institute National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) Kobe, Japan
  • Ort: Max-Planck-Institut für Dynamik und Selbstorganisation (MPIDS)
  • Raum: Prandtl Lecture Hall
  • Gastgeber: MPIDS
  • Kontakt: isabella.guido@ds.mpg.de
Molecular motors found in creatures, such as myosins, kinesins, and dyneins, are ATPases and so unique that they convert the chemical energy coupled with ATP hydrolysis directly into force and movement. Despite their nano-meter sizes, they move unidirectionally on protein filaments in a ro-bust manner despite thermal agitation. The decades of intensive studies have, however, not revealed the essence of this directional motion: we do not know how the structural change of motors, and the asymmetric structures of the motor-filament interface contribute to the directional motion. Under-standing the essence of directional motion has hampered by the limitation that neither motors nor cytoskeletal filaments can be rationally re-designed in order to address key questions. To overcome the limitation, we took the bottom-up approaches, in which we design new molecular motors and tracks and created them using protein- and DNA-building blocks. Here, we constructed hybrid mo-tors of dynein and DNA-binding proteins. DNA was used as a track instead of cytoskeletal fila-ments because of its stability and abilities of synthesis and self-organization. In in vitro motility as-says, these hybrid motors moved 10-helix DNA nanotubes at the mean velocity of 8 nms-1. The hy-brid motors are shown to recognize the specific DNA sequence that is periodically incorporated into the DNA nanotube. Therefore, our strategy paves the way into systematic approaches to the motor mechanism and to nanotechnological applications using large repertories of DNA-based molecular tools.
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