Welcome to the Kinesin Nomenclature Information Resource

DESCRIPTION

Individual kinesins are often named based upon their functional characteristics. However, kinesins are sometimes named based upon the position of the motor core within the protein, or by their evolutionary relatedness to other kinesins. Today there are literally hundreds being named based upon differing criteria, and inconsistencies are emerging that can cause genuine confusion.

These issues were recently discussed at the American Society for Cell Biology Annual Meeting in San Francisco, California. The agenda for that meeting appears below with the presentation descriptions and (if made available) each contributor's PowerPoint presentation itself.

It is the goal of this site to provide access to researchers interested in the topic of kinesin nomenclature so that we can come to some sort of agreement on a single kinesin nomenclature for use in the scientific community.

Finally, researchers' thoughts on which nomenclature should be chosen as well as how we should proceed with this issue can be found here. To contribute your comments, email triffid@iastate.edu with your thoughts, using "Kinesin Nomenclature Comments" for the subject line.

EXAMPLE PROBLEMS

AGENDA

Contributor	Title	Description (pdf)	Presentation (ppt)
Carolyn Lawrence	An introduction to kinesin nomenclature problems	here	here
Karen Christie	Specific bioinformatic concerns (Gene Ontologies)	here
Holly Goodson	Lessons learned from other protein families	here	here
Nobutaka Hirokawa	Nomenclature Schema	here
Scott Dawson	Phylogeny Including Many Protist Sequences	here	here
Carolyn Lawrence	Nomenclature Schema	here	here
Manfred Schliwa	Nomenclature Schema	here
Bill Saxton	Nomenclature Schema	here
Jonathan Scholey	Nomenclature Schema	here	here
Dick Cheney	Comic Relief	here

COMMON/CONSENSUS OBSERVATIONS

1. A single nomenclature must be adopted and used by all kinesin researchers to facilitate ease of communication.

2. Each family bears the name "Kinesin."

3. If we choose an arbitrary system (like the one used by the myosin community), Arabic numerals are preferable to Roman numerals for database searches (e.g., PubMed).

4. Individual sequences will not be renamed. Rather families will be renamed, and any individual sequence should be referred to as "a XXX kinesin family member."

5. Family designations should be based on phylogenetic analysis. In order to gain the status of a recognized kinesin family or subfamily, the group of related proteins in question must be from at least two kingdoms. Sequences not grouping consistently within a family will be called "Orphan Kinesins." Using these criteria, we now recognize 14 families.

THE VOTE

After a good deal of time, a manuscript was largely agreed upon and distributed to kinesin researchers worldwide. All that remained was to choose a set of names to use for family designators. To see the ballot, click here. Poll results can be seen here. (Nobutaka Hirokawa drafted the first version of the ballot, and Bill Saxton was responsible for organizing and administering the election.)

LINKS TO TREES

Kinesin Home Page (Kim and Endow 2000)
Lawrence et al., 2002
Hirokawa 1998