My first few weeks here as a summer student have excited me with the tiniest motors in the world, and I would like to share my fascination with you.
Molecular motors are protein molecules.
The group at the Marie Curie is particularly interested in a superfamily of molecular motors called kinesins. These protein motors move along filamentous tracks called microtubules inside a cell. Remarkably, the core sequence of a certain type of kinesin is conserved throughout all eukaryotes, which suggests important conserved function for these motors. The group here is investigating kinesins from organisms such as fungi, fruit flies and frogs, with the philosophy that the understanding of their mechanism will shed light on the kinesins of a wide range of organisms, including humans. Without kinesins, these cargoes could only be transported by diffusion, which is intolerably slow over large distances.