Welcome to Neil Kad's Lab Homepage
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Cells are alive, dynamic structures that need to transport cargoes over large distances (up to mm!) and therefore require motors to transport these cargoes.
What's more, cells contain vast amounts of DNA (each human genome is ~2m long) and these serve as tracks for enzymes that replicate, repair and read the DNA.
Molecular motors are enzymes that convert chemical energy (ATP) into translational movement. Examples are myosin and kinesin:
Myosin (movie from the Vale Group UCSF)
This motor is involved in a variety of roles from muscle contraction to cargo transport.
This video of muscle contraction shows how myosin II's ATPase is coupled to its ability to generate motion.
For more information on myosin click here.
Kinesin (movie from the Vale Group UCSF)
This motor is mainly involved cargo transport through the cell. This video also shows how kinesin's ATPase is coupled to its motility.
For more information on kinesin click here.
What's the difference?
None really, this is just another way of saying that we study moving proteins that don't use a nucleotide energy source to bias their motion; instead they use thermal energy and therefore move by Brownian motion in a random walk.
We are studying the motion of DNA binding proteins as they diffuse one-dimensionally along their track, DNA. The video below shows a fluorescently labelled protein as it diffuses over microns of DNA!
Department of Biological Sciences
Contact Details:
Neil Kad
Dept. of Biological Sciences
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
Colchester CO4 3SQ UK
+44 (0)1206 874403
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