Kinesin Delivers: Identifying Receptors for Motor Proteins

What is it about movement in cells that commands our attention? What biologist has not enjoyed turning a microscope on a cell, almost any cell, really, and watching all the commotion? When vesicles, mitochondria, chloroplasts, nuclei, or chromosomes move, we are being treated to an elegant, easily observable manifestation of molecular events. Decades of effort to understand intracellular movement have given rise to two of the great thrusts of modern cell biology: the study of which things go where, usually referred to as intracellular trafficking; and the identification of the protein machines that generate movement, the molecular motors. But we have an incomplete picture of how the cell's array of motor proteins gives rise to the variety of journeys that their cargoes make. The kinesin motors that generate movement along microtubule tracks are a case in point (Vale...