Clustering of kinesin motors enhances vesicle transport efficiency

Intracellular vesicles are generally transported by a small number of kinesin and dynein motors. However, biophysical characterization of kinesin-1 motors in vitro indicates that it has a relatively slow binding rate to the microtubule, which predicts that high motor copy numbers are required for long-range transport. At present, there is very limited data relating vesicle travel distance to the total number of motors present on the cargo. To fill this knowledge gap, we reconstituted motility of 120-nm-diameter liposomes driven by multiple kinesin-1 motors.