© 2006 The Japanese Biochemical Society.
Regular Paper |
Preparation and Characterization of a Novel Rice Plant–Specific Kinesin
1 Laboratories of Plant and Microbial Genome Control, Graduate School of Science and Technology, Niigata University, Niigata 950-2181; and 2 Division of Bioengineering, Graduate School of Engineering, Soka University, Hachioji, Tokyo 192-8577
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. Fax: +81-426-91-9312, E-mail: shinsaku{at}t.soka.ac.jp (Shinsaku Maruta); Fax: +81-25-262-6641, E-mail: t.mitsui{at}agrews.agr.niigata-u.ac.jp (Toshiaki Mitsui)
Kinesin is an ATP-driven motor protein that plays important physiological roles in intracellular transport, mitosis and meiosis, control of microtubule dynamics, and signal transduction. The kinesin family is classified into subfamilies. Kinesin species derived from vertebrates have been well characterized. In contrast, plant kinesins have yet to be adequately characterized. In this study, we expressed the motor domain of a novel rice plant-specific kinesin, K16, in Escherichia coli, and then determined its enzymatic characteristics and compared them with those of kinesin 1. Our findings demonstrated that the rice kinesin motor domain has different enzymatic properties from those of well known kinesin 1.