Single-headed mode of kinesin-5

In most organisms, kinesin-5 motors are essential for mitosis and meiosis, where they crosslink and slide apart the antiparallel microtubule half-spindles. Recently, it was shown using single-molecule optical trapping that a truncated, double-headed human kinesin-5 dimer can step processively along microtubules. However, processivity is limited (similar to 8 steps) with little coordination between the heads, raising the possibility that kinesin-5 motors might also be able to move by a nonprocessive mechanism. To investigate this, we engineered single-headed kinesin-5 dimers. We show that a set of these single-headed Eg5 dimers drive microtubule sliding at about 90% of wild-type velocity, indicating that Eg5 can slide microtubules by a mechanism in which one head of each Eg5 head-pair is effectively redundant. On the basis of this, we propose a muscle-like model for Eg5-driven microtubule sliding in spindles in which most force-generating events are single-headed interactions and alternate-heads processivity is rare.