Molecular Cutting Machine: Katanin Microtubule Severing Enzyme

Microtubules are required to perform multidues of essential cellular processes. For these funcations, they must form and fall apart in a regulated manner. The microtubule severing enzymes are a family of molecular machines from the ATPases associated with various cellular Activities (AAA+) family of enzymes that use ATP to cut microtubules anywhere along their length. Our recent work on katanin has revealed surprising results including that katanin is inhibited by the presence of free tubulin, katanin can depolymerize microtubules lacking the carboxy-terminal tail, and katanin only mildly disrupts cell division, even when tethered directly to the kinetochore.