Researcher Dr Algirdas Toleikis on What Molecular Motors Are, Why We Need Them and What They Have in Common with Michael Jackson
Imagine a city with a lot of things to transport. A product is produced in one place and needed in another. In a city, goods are transported by trucks. Cells are also like a big busy microscopic city where intracellular vesicles with proteins, hormones, neurotransmitters etc. are transported. Only here, the transport function is carried out by molecular motors, of which there are thousands in each of our cells. “Every car in a city is driven by a human being, they have a driving licence, they obey the traffic rules, they know what cargo they are carrying and where it needs to be delivered. But who ‘drives’ the molecular motors?”, asks Dr Algirdas Toleikis, a biochemist and biophysicist who studies what happens in our microscopic cities.
