WANG Pan is a PhD student of HENU School of Physics and Electronics, and her advisor is Professor GUO Lijun. As the first author, Wang Pan recently published a research paper entitled “The central stalk determines the motility of mitotic kinesin-14 homodimers” in Current Biology (2018, 28:1-7). Earlier this year, she also published another work in Nature Communications as a co-first author entitled with “The preprophase band-associated kinesin-14 OsKCH2 is a processive minus-end-directed microtubule motor” [2018, 9(1): 1067].

The results published in Current Biology reveal that besides the canonical role of enabling dimerization, the central stalk also functions as a mechanical component to determine the motility of homodimeric mitotic kinesin-14 motors, which provides a successful example for people to design and regulate the molecular devices of the kinematic protein.

The results published in Nature Communications for the first time report the plant-specific kinesin-14 OsKCH2 that exhibits processive minus-end-directed motility on single microtubules, proving that CC1, but not CC2, forms the coiled-coil to enable OsKCH2 dimerization. These achievements further revealed the controllable motility, directivity and the correlation between the structure and biological function of kinesin homodimers, which are of significance for understanding the evolution mechanism and design principles of motor protein in life science.

Full text link:  http://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2018.05.026

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03480-w