Sequence and phylogenetic analysis of squid myosin-V: a vesicle motor in nerve cells

We have shown that vesicles in the axoplasm of the squid giant axon move on actin filaments and that movement is inhibited by myosin V-specific antibodies [Tabb et al., 1998]. In the study reported in this article, experiments were performed to clone and sequence the cDNA for squid brain myosin V. Five proteolytic fragments of purified squid brain myosin V were analyzed by direct protein sequencing [Tabb et al., 1998]. Based on this sequence information, degenerate primers were constructed and used to isolate cDNA clones by PCR. Five clones, representing overlapping segments of the gene, were sequenced. The sequence data and the previous biochemical characterization of the molecule support the classification of this vesicle-associated myosin as a member of the class V myosins. Motif analysis of the head, neck, and tail domains revealed that squid MyoV has consensus sequences for all the motifs found in vertebrate members of the myosin V family of motor proteins. A phylogenetic tree was constructed from a sequence alignment by the neighbor-joining method, using Megalign (DNAStar, Madison, WI); the resulting phylogenetic tree showed that squid MyoV is more closely related to vertebrate MyoV (mouse dilute, chicken dilute, rat myr6, and human myo5a) than Drosophila and yeast (myo2, and myo4) myosins V. These new data on the phylogenetic relationships of squid myosin V to vertebrate myosin V strengthens the argument that myosin V functions as a vesicle motor in vertebrate neurons.