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Originally published in Science Express on 18 December 2003
Science 30 January 2004:
Vol. 303. no. 5658, pp. 676 - 678
DOI: 10.1126/science.1093753
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Reports

Kinesin Walks Hand-Over-Hand

Ahmet Yildiz,1 Michio Tomishige,3* Ronald D. Vale,3 Paul R. Selvin1,2{dagger}

Kinesin is a processive motor that takes 8.3-nm center-of-mass steps along microtubules for each adenosine triphosphate hydrolyzed. Whether kinesin moves by a "hand-over-hand" or an "inchworm" model has been controversial. We have labeled a single head of the kinesin dimer with a Cy3 fluorophore and localized the position of the dye to within 2 nm before and after a step. We observed that single kinesin heads take steps of 17.3 ± 3.3 nm. A kinetic analysis of the dwell times between steps shows that the 17-nm steps alternate with 0-nm steps. These results strongly support a hand-over-hand mechanism, and not an inchworm mechanism. In addition, our results suggest that kinesin is bound by both heads to the microtubule while it waits for adenosine triphosphate in between steps.

1 Center for Biophysics and Computational Biology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL 61801, USA.
2 Physics Department, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL 61801, USA.
3 Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology, University of California, San Francisco, CA 94107, USA.


* Present address: Department of Applied Physics, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113–8656, Japan.

{dagger} To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: selvin{at}uiuc.edu

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