Arthropod Kinesins

Kinesin proteins are critical to the transport of various cellular components in many organisms. Since different classes of cargo are often transported by different kinesins, there is a huge diversity of kinesin transporters. Using a blastp search to identify homologues among arthropods to the head region of a Drosophila kinesin protein identified 151 kinesin-related sequences from a total of seven species.

The following organisms were represented:

• Drosophila melanogaster 76 hits
• Drosophila yakuba 1 hit
• Drosophila pseudoobscura 23 hits
• Anopheles gambiae str. 24 hits (malaria-carrying mosquito)
• Apis mellifera 24 hits (honeybee)
• Bombyx mori 1 hit (silk moth)
• Lymantria dispar 2 hits (moth)
  
  

The blastp search was used for its ability to search between proteins of distant homology. The head region (amino acid residues 1 to 350) of the Drosophila kinesin protein P17210 was used as the query sequence, with the search limited to arthropods and entries with Entrez kinesin references. The default settings for the search matrix (BLOSUM62) and gap penalties (eleven for existence, one for extension) were used because of their wide application. The search reveals that many kinesin or kinesin-like proteins have been found in a wide variety of organisms, even among arthropods, few of which, aside from Drosophila, are genetically well-characterized.