Eukaryotic cilia/flagella are ancient organelles with motility and sensory functions. Cilia display significant ultrastructural conservation where present across the eukaryotic phylogeny; however, diversity in ciliary biology exists and the ability to produce cilia has been lost independently on a number of occasions. Land plants provide an excellent system for the investigation of cilia evolut...

No study has evaluated the correlation between different expression of nitric oxide synthase (NOS) isoforms in nasal epithelial cells and nasal NO (nNO) level in primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD). Gene expression of endothelial (NOS3) and inducible NOS (NOS2) and their correlation with nNO level, ciliary function and morphology were studied in patients with PCD or secondary ciliary dyskinesia (S...

Potential recordings made simultaneously from opposite ends of the cell indicate that the cytoplasmic compartment of P. caudatum is nearly isopotential. Measured decrements of the spread of steady-state potentials are in essential agreement with calculated decrements for a short cable model of similar dimensions and electrical constants. Action potentials and passively conducted pulses spread a...

Swine confinement workers are at increased risk of airway diseases, including mucus membrane irritation syndrome, chronic rhinosinusitis and chronic bronchitis. Dust extracts from swine confinement facilities stimulate the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines in bronchial epithelial cells, including interleukin (IL)-8. As IL-8 is capable of blocking beta-agonist-stimulated increases in cili...

WDR92 is a highly conserved WD-repeat protein that has been proposed to be involved in apoptosis and also to be part of a prefoldin-like cochaperone complex. We found that WDR92 has a phylogenetic signature that is generally compatible with it playing a role in the assembly or function of specifically motile cilia. To test this hypothesis, we performed an RNAi-based knockdown of WDR92 gene expr...

Muco-ciliary transport in the human airway is a crucial defense mechanism for removing inhaled pathogens. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is well-suited to monitor functional dynamics of cilia and mucus on the airway epithelium. Here we demonstrate several OCT-based methods upon an actively transporting in vitro bronchial epithelial model and ex vivo mouse trachea. We show quantitative flow ...

Dynein motors of cilia and flagella function in the context of the axoneme, a very large network of microtubules and associated proteins. To understand how dyneins assemble and attach to this network, we characterized two Chlamydomonas outer arm dynein assembly (oda) mutants at a new locus, ODA16. Both oda16 mutants display a reduced beat frequency and altered swimming behavior, similar to prev...

The quakingviable mouse (qkv) is a spontaneous recessive mouse mutant with a deletion of approximately 1.1 Mb in the proximal region of chromosome 17. The deletion affects the expression of three genes; quaking (Qk), Parkin-coregulated gene (Pacrg) and parkin (Park2). The resulting phenotype, which includes dysmyelination of the central nervous system and male sterility, is due to reduced expre...