Kinesins that chew up spindle microtubules might move chromosomes.
Vale
After all the years of searching, could the hunt for an anaphase motor be over? Greg Rogers did not make such a direct claim, but the possibility was the unspoken subtext of his talk about Kin I kinesins in flies.
These unusual kinesins can barely lay claim to being motors—their primary activity is to degrade microtubule ends rather than to walk over intact microtubules. But the mitotic spindle has been increasingly portrayed as a restless structure where tubulin subunits are constantly coming and going from microtubule ends. Now, Rogers and David Sharp (Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, NY) are proposing that the turnover of microtubules by Kin I kinesins is responsible for the majority of chromosome movement in anaphase.
The destruction in question occurs at both kinetochores and spindle poles. Chewing of microtubules at...
