Motility articles from across Nature Portfolio

Intraflagellar transport is essential for the formation and function of cilia. Here, the authors use single-molecule imaging in live C. elegans to show that transport trains are formed by the sequential attachment of proteins before departing into the cilium.

In Zebrafish embryos spinal cords, neural precursors are clustered in two distinct populations based on their spindle-microtubule enrichment. KIF16Ba, CAMSAP2a/3a and spindle-microtubule enrichment control Sara endosome motility and mediate neural precursor fates.

Mutational analysis of the flagellar export apparatus protein FlhA suggests that the conserved GYXLI motif of FlhA, together with the cytoplasmic ATPase complex, strictly regulate the order of flagellar protein export.

This study presents an image processing-based stage height control and optical trap dithering technique to detect protein-protein interactions. It was used to show that the MT binding rate for KIF5B has a strong spatial and motor length dependence.

Arp2/3 complex forms branched actin filaments for cell movements. Here, the authors report cryo-EM structures of branch junctions with ADP or ADPBeF_x (to mimic γ-phosphate) bound to Arp3 to explain why γ-phosphate dissociation destabilizes branches.

Inspired by biology, great progress has been made in creating artificial molecular motors. Here the authors report the synthesis and characterization of the Lawnmower, an autonomous, protein-based artificial molecular motor and show their design is capable of track-guided motion.

Orderly or coherent multicellular flows are fundamental in biology, but their triggers are not understood. In epithelial tissues, the tug-of-war between cells is now shown to lead to intrinsic asymmetric distributions in cell polarities that drive such flows.

Macroscale analogies are a powerful conceptual tool with which we can gain insight into the structures and processes of the microscopic world of cell biology.

Vertebrate hearing uses mechanosensory cells operating near an oscillatory instability. Physics reveals how this mechanism might have evolved from ‘chance and necessity’.

Non-equilibrium thermodynamics describes activity-stabilized mixed states in complex active-matter systems.

The microtubule motor dynein is regulated by lissencephaly-1 (Lis1) at several points during its complex activation process. Two papers reveal the molecular mechanism for two steps: the beginning, when Lis1 acts as a wedge to disrupt dynein’s autoinhibited conformation; and the end, when microtubule binding ejects Lis1 from the motor.