Kinesin-14 motors drive a right-handed helical motion of antiparallel microtubules around each other

Aniruddha Mitra, Laura Meißner, Rojapriyadharshini Gandhimathi, Roman Renger, Felix Ruhnow and Stefan Diez ()
Additional contact information
Aniruddha Mitra: Technische Universität Dresden
Laura Meißner: Technische Universität Dresden
Rojapriyadharshini Gandhimathi: Technische Universität Dresden
Roman Renger: Technische Universität Dresden
Felix Ruhnow: Technische Universität Dresden
Stefan Diez: Technische Universität Dresden

Nature Communications, 2020, vol. 11, issue 1, 1-11

Abstract: Abstract Within the mitotic spindle, kinesin motors cross-link and slide overlapping microtubules. Some of these motors exhibit off-axis power strokes, but their impact on motility and force generation in microtubule overlaps has not been investigated. Here, we develop and utilize a three-dimensional in vitro motility assay to explore kinesin-14, Ncd, driven sliding of cross-linked microtubules. We observe that free microtubules, sliding on suspended microtubules, not only rotate around their own axis but also move around the suspended microtubules with right-handed helical trajectories. Importantly, the associated torque is large enough to cause microtubule twisting and coiling. Further, our technique allows us to measure the in situ spatial extension of the motors between cross-linked microtubules to be about 20 nm. We argue that the capability of microtubule-crosslinking kinesins to cause helical motion of overlapping microtubules around each other allows for flexible filament organization, roadblock circumvention and torque generation in the mitotic spindle.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16328-z Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:11:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-020-16328-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-16328-z

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().