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Brownian search-and-catch mechanism for myosin-VI steps

Nature Chemical Biology volume 5, pages 403–405 (2009)Cite this article

Abstract

The cargo transporter myosin-VI processively walks along actin filaments using its two heads. Here we use single-molecule nanometry to show that the strong binding by myosin heads to actin is greatly accelerated (∼30-fold) when backward strain is applied to weakly bound heads during the actin search. We propose that the myosin head searches for the forward actin target by Brownian motion and catches the actin in a strain-dependent manner.

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Figure 1: Rapid scan experiment and binding events.
Figure 2: Strain-dependent asymmetric catch (strong binding) of myosin-VI.

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Acknowledgements

We thank S. Nishikawa, H. Takagi and Y. Togashi for valuable discussion; P. Karagiannis for reading the manuscript; and colleagues of the Yanagida laboratory for comments and discussion. The work was supported by the Yuragi Project and Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) and by the Soft Nanomachine Project of the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Medicine, Osaka University, Osaka, Japan

    Mitsuhiro Iwaki, Atsuko H Iwane & Toshio Yanagida

  2. Soft Biosystem Group, Laboratories for Nanobiology, Graduate School of Frontier Biosciences, Osaka University, Osaka, Japan

    Mitsuhiro Iwaki, Atsuko H Iwane, Tetsuya Shimokawa & Toshio Yanagida

  3. Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics and Cardiovascular Research Institute, University of California, San Francisco, California, USA

    Roger Cooke

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  1. Mitsuhiro Iwaki
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  5. Toshio Yanagida
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Contributions

M.I. designed and performed all experiments and analyzed data. A.H.I. purified the wild-type construct of myosin-VI. T.S. contributed to data analysis and manuscript writing. R.C. and T.Y. discussed the concept of the model. The manuscript was written by M.I. and T.Y., and all authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Toshio Yanagida.

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Supplementary Figures 1–3 and Supplementary Methods (PDF 340 kb)

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Iwaki, M., Iwane, A., Shimokawa, T. et al. Brownian search-and-catch mechanism for myosin-VI steps. Nat Chem Biol 5, 403–405 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nchembio.171

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