Myosin

Common card · No. 320794

Myosins () are a family of motor proteins (though most often protein complexes) best known for their roles in muscle contraction and in a wide range of other motility processes in eukaryotes. They are ATP-dependent and responsible for actin-based motility. The first myosin (M2) to be discovered was in 1864 by Wilhelm Kühne. Kühne had extracted a viscous protein from skeletal muscle that he held responsible for keeping the tension state in muscle. He called this protein myosin. The term has been extended to include a group of similar ATPases found in the cells of both striated muscle tissue and smooth muscle tissue. Following the discovery in 1973 of enzymes with myosin-like function in Acanthamoeba castellanii, a global range of divergent myosin genes have been discovered throughout the realm of eukaryotes. Although myosin was originally thought to be restricted to muscle cells (hence myo-(s) + -in), there is no single "myosin"; rather it is a very large superfamily of genes whose protein...

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