Figure 1.

KIF3C is a novel member of the KIF3 family of kinesins. (A) Amino acid sequence predicted from the full-length cDNA. The sequence recognized by the anti-peptide antibody used in library screening is underlined. A 26-amino acid sequence from the motor domain of KIF3C, missing in KIF3A and KIF3B, is shown in bold. The nucleotide sequence of KIF3C is available from GenBank/EMBL/DDBJ under accession number AJ223599. (B) Comparison between the protein sequences of KIF3C and mouse brain KIF3A and KIF3B (diagonal dot matrix plot at a window of size 8 and stringency of 60%). The highest divergence resides in the last 79 amino acids of KIF3C (not included in the plots). A similar comparison between KIF3A (Aizawa et al., 1992) and KIF3B (Yamazaki et al., 1995) is also shown. Note that KIF3C is more similar to KIF3B (middle plot) than it is to KIF3A (left plot) or KIF3A is to KIF3B (right plot). (C) Diagram showing the probability of forming a coiled-coil calculated for KIF3C according to Lupas et al. (1991), using a window of 21 amino acids. (D) Sequence charge analysis of KIF3C, KIF3A, and KIF3B in a restricted domain (underlined in C) from the expected region of dimerization. Charge distribution in KIF3C indicates a low probability of either homodimerization or heterodimerization with KIF3B, but a high probability of dimerization with KIF3A.