Meet the Kinesins, Your Body’s On-Time Cellular Supply Chain Trucking Fleet
Those billions of cells that make up your body require all kinds of supplies in order to fulfill their respective functions in keeping you alive and well. That’s where the “walking wonder” of the Kinesin family of molecular motors enters the picture.
As the Discovery Institute’s Evolution News & Science Today explains, the Kinesin-II is especially fascinating because of how it moves about supply-chain-like delivering needed supplies where and when required:
“Kinesin-II, one of the extended family of kinesin motors, is involved in a ‘relay race’ on a micro-miniature scale. It demonstrates how different families of molecular motors cooperate.
Kinesin-II “feet” move the molecular motor along its delivery route. (Screenshot from YouTube)
“This one works in synergy with other cargo-carrying motors in the important complex function known as ‘intra-flagellar transport’ (IFT) that builds and maintains cilia and flagella. An important example occurs in the neurons of the eye.”
As the following animated video demonstrates, the Kinesin-II has a couple of “feet” with which it moves itself along a receiving cell, as it unloads whatever supplies it happens to be carrying. Being a molecular motor, the Kinesin-II has distinct parts that require assembly in a specific sequence. It doesn’t happen by chance; it happens by design: