  Conventional kinesin is a motor protein, which is able to walk along a
microtubule processively. The exact mechanism of the stepping motion and force
generation of kinesin is still far from clear. In this paper we argue that neck
linker docking is a crucial element of this mechanism, without which the
experimentally observed dwell times of the steps could not be explained under a
wide range of loading forces. We also show that the experimental data impose
very strict constraints on the lengths of both the neck linker and its docking
section, which are compatible with the known structure of kinesin.
