Kinesin tail domains are intrinsically disordered

Mark A. Seeger, Yongbo Zhang, Sarah E. Rice*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

17 Scopus citations

Abstract

Kinesin motor proteins transport a wide variety of molecular cargoes in a spatially and temporally regulated manner. Kinesin motor domains, which hydrolyze ATP to produce a directed mechanical force along a microtubule, are well conserved throughout the entire superfamily. Outside of the motor domains, kinesin sequences diverge along with their transport functions. The nonmotor regions, particularly the tails, respond to a wide variety of structural and molecular cues that enable kinesins to carry specific cargoes in response to particular cellular signals. Here, we demonstrate that intrinsic disorder is a common structural feature of kinesins. A bioinformatics survey of the full-length sequences of all 43 human kinesins predicts that significant regions of intrinsically disordered residues are present in all kinesins. These regions are concentrated in the nonmotor domains, particularly in the tails and near sites for ligand binding or post-translational modifications. In order to experimentally verify these predictions, we expressed and purified the tail domains of kinesins representing three different families (Kif5B, Kif10, and KifC3). Circular dichroism and NMR spectroscopy experiments demonstrate that the isolated tails are disordered in vitro, yet they retain their functional microtubule-binding activity. On the basis of these results, we propose that intrinsic disorder is a common structural feature that confers functional specificity to kinesins. Proteins 2012;.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)2437-2446
Number of pages10
JournalProteins: Structure, Function and Bioinformatics
Volume80
Issue number10
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 2012

Funding

Keywords

  • Circular dichroism
  • Intrinsic disorder
  • Kinesin
  • NMR spectroscopy
  • Structure prediction
  • Tail domain

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Molecular Biology
  • Structural Biology
  • Biochemistry

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