Calcium ion channels that determine many of the properties of cilia are different in motile cilia as compared to primary cilia and flagella.

Dopamine plays a number of important physiological roles. However, activation of dopamine receptor type-5 (DR5) and its effect in renal epithelial cells have not been studied. Here, we show for the first time that DR5 is localized to primary cilia of LLCPK kidney cells. Renal epithelial cilia are mechanosensory organelles that sense and respond to tubular fluid-flow in the kidney. To determine ...

Although solitary or sensory cilia are present in most cells of the body and their existence has been known since the sixties, very little is known about their functions. One suspected function is fluid flow sensing- physical bending of cilia produces an influx of Ca++, which can then result in a variety of activated signaling pathways. Defective cilia and ciliary-associated proteins have been ...

In vertebrates, almost all somatic cells extend a single immotile cilium, referred to as a primary cilium. Increasing evidence suggests that primary cilia serve as cellular antennae in many types of tissues by sensing chemical or mechanical stimuli in the milieu surrounding the cells. In rodents an antibody to adenylyl cyclase 3 (AC3) has been widely used to label the primary cilia of neurons i...

The diversity of sensory cilia on Caenorhabditis elegans neurons allows the animal to detect a variety of sensory stimuli. Sensory cilia are assembled by intraflagellar transport (IFT) kinesins, which transport ciliary precursors, bound to IFT particles, along the ciliary axoneme for incorporation into ciliary structures. Using fluorescence microscopy of living animals and serial section electr...

In this paper we quantitatively analyse the performance of magnetically-driven artificial cilia for lab-on-a-chip applications. The artificial cilia are fabricated using thin polymer films with embedded magnetic nano-particles and their deformation is studied under different external magnetic fields and flows. A coupled magneto-mechanical solid-fluid model that accurately captures the interacti...

Motile cilia are an essential component of the mouse, zebrafish, and Xenopus laevis Left Right Organizers, generating nodal flow and allowing the reception and transduction of mechanosensory signals. Nonmotile primary cilia are also an important component of the Left Right Organizer's chemosensory mechanism. It has been proposed in the chicken that signaling in Hensen's node, the Left Right Org...

The assembly of the axoneme, the structural scaffold of cilia and flagella, requires translocation of a vast quantity of tubulin into the growing cilium, but the mechanisms that regulate the targeting, quantity, and timing of tubulin transport are largely unknown. In Chlamydomonas, GFP-tagged α-tubulin enters cilia as an intraflagellar transport (IFT) cargo and by diffusion. IFT-based transport...

Cilia are microtubule-based organelles that project like antennae from the surface of most cells in the body. Motile cilia move fluid past cells, for example mucus in the airway. Non-motile primary cilia, however, transduce a multitude of sensory stimuli, including chemical concentrations of growth factors, hormones, odorants, and developmental morphogens, as well as osmolarity, light intensity...

As essential components of the eukaryotic cytoskeleton, microtubules fulfill a variety of functions that can be temporally and spatially controlled by tubulin posttranslational modifications. Tubulin glycylation has so far been mostly found on motile cilia and flagella, where it is involved in the stabilization of the axoneme. In contrast, barely anything is known about the role of glycylation ...