Table 1.

Timeline of the studies of cytoskeletal motors

1941, 1942	Discovery of myosin and actomyosin (Banga and Szent-Györgyi 1941–1942)
1943	Discovery of G- and F-actin (Straub 1943)
1954	Proposal of the sliding filament theory of muscle contraction (Huxley and Niedergerke 1954; Huxley and Hanson 1954)
1965	Discovery of the first microtubule motor, dynein (Gibbons and Rowe 1965)
1967	Discovery of tubulin (Borisy and Taylor 1967)
1985	Discovery of the kinesin microtubule motor (Brady 1985; Vale et al. 1985)
1989	Single-molecule assay for kinesin (Howard et al. 1989)
1993	Structures of myosin and actomyosin (Rayment et al. 1993a, b)
1994	Single-molecule assay for myosin (Finer et al. 1994)
1995	Structures of the kinesin microtubule complexes (Hirose et al. 1995; Hoenger et al. 1995; Kikkawa et al. 1995)
1996	Crystal structure of the kinesin motor (Kull et al. 1996)
1998	Visualisation of the power stroke of myosin (Dominguez et al. 1998)
1999	Single-molecule study of dynein (Sakakibara et al. 1999)
1999	Visualisation of the power stroke of kinesin (Rice et al. 1999)
2003	Visualisation of the power stroke of dynein (Burgess et al. 2003)
2011, 2012	Crystal structures of the dynein motors (Carter et al. 2011; Kon et al. 2012)