THE KINESIN WALK - A DYNAMIC-MODEL WITH ELASTICALLY COUPLED HEADS

Recently individual two-headed kinesin molecules have been studied In in vitro motility assays revealing a number of their peculiar transpor t properties. In this paper we propose a simple and robust model for t he kinesin stepping process with elastically coupled Brownian heads th at show all of these properties, The analytic and numerical treatment of our model results in a very good fit to the experimental data and p ractically has no free parameters. Changing the values of the paramete rs in the restricted range allowed by the related experimental estimat es has almost no effect on the shape of the curves and results mainly in a variation of the zero load velocity that can be directly fitted t o the measured data, In addition, the model is consistent with the mea sured pathway of the kinesin ATPase.