ABSTRACT
Dalton), multisubunit proteins. Gibbons and Rowe (1965) were the first to give the name "dynein", of which dyne means a force in Latin, to an ATPase isolated from the ciliated protozoan Tetrahymena. We also tried to purify dynein from sperm flagella of Japanese sea urchins (Mohri et al., 1969; Ogawa and Mohri, 1972). These marine organisms were incomparably superior to Tetrahymena in that large quantities of motile sperm could be obtained just by injecting 0.5 M KCI into the body cavity. Ian and Barbara Gibbons performed many experiments from the late 1960s to the early 1970s that demonstrated that "dynein" is the motor protein responsible for sperm motility. Finally, the Hawaiian group succeeded in preparing a Triton model of sperm (Gibbons and Gibbons, 1972) and in visualizing the process of active sliding of axonemal doublet-microtubules induced by ATP (Summers and Gibbons, 1971).
