Mechanochemical couplings of kinesin motors

Kinesins are molecular motors capable of moving processively along microtubule in a stepwise manner by hydrolyzing ATP. Numerous experimental results on various aspects of their dynamical behaviours are available in literature. Although a number of models of tightly coordinated mechanism have been proposed to explain some experimental results, up to now no good explanation has been given to all these experimental results by using a single model. We have recently proposed such a model of partially coordinated hand-over-hand moving mechanism. In this paper, we use this model to study in detail various aspects of the dynamical properties of single kinesin molecules. We show that kinesin dimers walk hand-over-hand along microtubules in a partially coordinated rather than a tightly coordinated manner. The degree of coordination depends on the ratio of the two heads' ATPase rates that are in turn determined by both internal elastic force and external load. We have tested this model using various available experimental results on different samples and obtained a good agreement between the theory and the experiments. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.