He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Great Britain in 1983. The Society stated:
He discovered, named and characterised the founding member of the dynein ATPase family of motor proteins and other microtubular components in cilia and flagella. By elegantly combining biochemical techniques with light and electron microscopy, he greatly advanced our understanding of microtubule-based motility, particularly by the direct visual demonstration of active dynein-dependent sliding between adjacent microtubules in structurally weakened flagella.[7]
While at Harvard, Gibbons studied the structure of cilia and flagella of a protozoan called Tetrahymena with electron microscopes. In 1963, he discovered a novel proteinonmicrotubules and published its pictures.[9] Two years later, he purified two regions of the protein, known as its two "arms", naming the protein "dynein".[10] During his last year at Harvard, Gibbons demonstrated the protein making up microtubules was distinct from actin, in that the former was associated with guaninenucleotides while the latter with adenine nucleotides,[11] but refrained from naming it; Hideo Mohri from the University of Tokyo named it tubulin afterwards.[1]
Gibbons moved to the Kewalo Marine Laboratory, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, in 1967 as an associate professor. He found the cilia of sea urchinsperms easier to work with than the cilia and flagella of Tetrahymena. In 1969, he was promoted to professorofbiophysics.[4][12] Throughout the 1970s, Gibbons and his wife Barbara showed the sliding of microtubules caused cilia motility (known as the sliding tubule mechanism), and that this sliding was dependent on the energy generated from ATP hydrolysisbyATPase. When microtubules visibly slid out of the ends of the flagellar fiber, the flagella disintegrated.[13] He then extended the mechanism to mammals, confirming the motility mechanism of bull sperm cilia is the same as that for sea urchins.[14] After these findings, Gibbons switched his focus to the molecular biologyofdyneins, and determined the DNA sequence of the largest subunit of dynein in 1991.[15] In 1993, he became the director of the Kewalo Marine Laboratory.[4]
Ian and Barbara Gibbons retired from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in 1997; he went to the University of California, Berkeley as a research scientist in the laboratory of Beth Burnside. In 2009, Burnside closed her laboratory, and Gibbons became a visiting researcher.[4][12]
^ abcdGibbons, Ian R. (22 November 2017). "Discovery of dynein and its properties: A personal account". In King, Steven M. (ed.). Dyneins: The Biology of Dynein Motors (2nd ed.). Academic Press. pp. 3–87. ISBN978-0-12-809471-6.
