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A powerful stroke

Nature Structural Biology volume 5, pages 940–942 (1998)Cite this article

The swinging cross bridge theory for muscle contraction envisages that the myosin cross bridge binds to the actin filament in an initial conformation and then undergoes a swinging motion that 'rows' the actin filament along. This elemental event, which is part of a cycle driven by ATP hydrolysis, is known as the 'power-stroke'. Although the swinging cross bridge was first proposed 30 years ago and is supported by an impressive body of structural, physiological and biochemical data, it has been difficult to get at the details of the mechanism. Now, a recent paper1 has filled in key details, presenting a landmark structure — the crystal structure of the smooth muscle myosin motor-domain with the essential light chain crystallized with ADP.AlF4.

Protein crystallography has facilitated a breakthrough in the field of muscle research. The crystal structure of the myosin cross bridge (from chicken skeletal muscle) without nucleotide (and thus thought to represent the last stage of the power-stroke) was first determined by Rayment and coworkers2. One remarkable feature of their structure was that it showed the cross bridge to contain not only a more or less globular 'head' or motor domain, which contains the ATPase site and the actin binding site, but also a long C-terminal α-helical 'tail', which binds two calmodulin-like light chains and which looked as if it ought to be a lever arm. The detailed structure of the 'lever arm' (from scallop myosin) was then determined3. The 'lever arm' is attached to the motor domain by a small compact domain called the 'converter domain'4.

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Figure 1: Right, five molecules in an actin helix. Left, the myosin cross bridge in the open and closed conformation.
Figure 2: Right, five molecules of the actin helix. Left, smooth muscle myosin truncated at residue 819 carrying the essential light chain and with ADP.AlF4 or ADP.BeF3 bound in the active site1.

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  1. the Max Planck Institute fur Medizinische, Forschung, D-69120, Heidelberg, Germany

    Kenneth C. Holmes

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Holmes, K. A powerful stroke. Nat Struct Mol Biol 5, 940–942 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/2914

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