Breaking down microtubule severing motors with machine learning

Katanin is a nanomachine in the AAA+ family responsible for microtubule severing. Severing is required for several fundamental cellular functions such as cell division and neuronal regulation. Recently, the structure of katanin in the presence of a nucleotide and a poly-glutamylated peptide was solved with cryo-EM and was found to populate two hexameric states. At the center of both hexamers is a catalytic pore with two crucial loop structures that are relatively conserved in the AAA+ family and are known to bind to negatively charged tubulin carboxy terminal tails.