Not So Lame After All: Kinesin Still Walks with a Hobbled Head

It's no secret to electrophysiologists that single-molecule methods have driven some of the most impressive advances in our understanding of how biomolecules function. In fact, the power of single-molecule techniques had become abundantly clear by the mid 1980s, when a review of patch-clamp results noted “It is now routine to observe the behavior of one protein molecule with a time resolution approaching 10 μs. Amazing!” (Auerbach and Sachs, 1984). Further technological developments have made single-molecule methods available to a growing range of biophysical subfields, including the study of motor proteins, or mechanoenzymes (Block et al., 2007). As the techniques have become more robust and reliable, many of the key biochemical tools that have long been exploited in ensemble-averaged experiments, such as use of small-molecule inhibitors, are finding their way into single-molecule motility assays. A new report by Subramaniam and Gelles (on...