This family is a novel family of eukaryotic protein kinase catalytic domains, which have no detectable similarity to conventional kinases. The family contains myosin heavy chain kinases and Elongation Factor-2 kinase and a bifunctional ion channel. This family is known as the alpha-kinase family. The structure of the kinase domain revealed unexpected similarity to eukaryotic protein kinases in the catalytic core as well as to metabolic enzymes with ATP-grasp domains.