Cilia biogenesis and maintenance depends on intraflagellar transport (IFT) that at the same time mediates shuttling of cell-type-specific cargo. Mechanistic understanding of how the general IFT transport machinery links to the movement of specific ciliary cargo remains sparse. In this issue of The EMBO Journal, Zhao and Malicki (2011) show that two components of the IFT machinery (Fleer and IFT...

The dynamic organization of signaling cascades inside primary cilia is key to signal propagation. Yet little is known about the dynamics of ciliary membrane proteins besides a possible role for motor-driven Intraflagellar Transport (IFT). To characterize these dynamics, we imaged single molecules of Somatostatin Receptor 3 (SSTR3, a GPCR) and Smoothened (Smo, a Hedgehog signal transducer) in th...

Intraflagellar transport (IFT) proteins are well established as conserved mediators of flagellum/cilium assembly and disassembly. However, data has begun to accumulate in support of IFT protein involvement in other processes elsewhere in the cell. Here, we used synchronous cultures of Chlamydomonas to investigate the temporal patterns of accumulation and localization of IFT proteins during the ...

In this paper we prove Implicit Function Theorems (IFT) for algebraic varieties defined by regular quadratic equations and, more generally, regular NTQ systems over free groups. In the model theoretic language these results state the existence of very simple Skolem functions for particular ∀∃formulas over free groups. We construct these functions effectively. In noneffective form IFT first appe...

To better understand the numerous solutions related to watershed transform (WT), this paper shows the relationships between some discrete definitions of the WT: the watersheds based on image foresting transform (IFT), topographic distance (TD), local condition (LC), and minimum spanning forest (MSF). We demonstrate that the tie-zone (TZ) concept, that unifies the multiple solutions of a given W...

Abstract Sensory perception and metabolic homeostasis are known to deteriorate with ageing, impairing the health of aged animals, while mechanisms underlying their deterioration remain poorly understood. The potential interplay between declining sensory impaired metabolism during ageing is also barely explored. Here, we report that intraflagellar transport (IFT) in cilia neurons nematode Caenor...

Homodimeric KIF17 and heterotrimeric KIF3AB are processive, kinesin-2 family motors that act jointly to carry out anterograde intraflagellar transport (IFT), ferrying cargo along microtubules (MTs) toward the tips of cilia. How IFT trains attain speeds that exceed the unloaded rate of the slower, KIF3AB motor remains unknown. By characterizing the motility properties of kinesin-2 motors as a fu...

Flagellar axonemes assemble and continuously turn over at the flagellar tip. The supply and removal of axonemal subunits at the tip are mediated by intraflagellar transport (IFT), a motility process essential for the assembly and maintenance of all eukaryotic flagella and cilia. IFT is characterized by the movement of large protein complexes (IFT particles) from the basal bodies to the flagella...

Flagella are constructed and maintained through the highly conserved process of intraflagellar transport (IFT), which is a rapid movement of particles along the axonemal microtubules of cilia/flagella. Particles that are transported by IFT are composed of several protein subunits comprising two complexes (A and B), which are conserved among green algae, nematodes, and vertebrates. To determine ...

ARL13B (a small GTPase) and INPP5E (a phosphoinositide 5-phosphatase) are ciliary proteins encoded by causative genes of Joubert syndrome. We here showed, by taking advantage of a visible immunoprecipitation assay, that ARL13B interacts with the IFT46 -: IFT56 (IFT56 is also known as TTC26) dimer of the intraflagellar transport (IFT)-B complex, which mediates anterograde ciliary protein traffic...