#cilia

Euplotes ciliates resting and feeding. These single-celled organisms have cilia hairs which are bunched up into tufts called 'cirri' which function like little legs, allowing them to walk along the substrate.

theres a suggestive version of this on my alt

The Lady Buster is a character in my pony ttrpg campaign i run. she is the famous wife of an oil baron. Cilia has spent the campaign thus far disguised as her out of admiration. at least in large part because Buster is famous for inventing and driving cars in addition to being rich and beautiful. and Cilia is freaky about the combustion engine in addition to being gay.

Visualing Function

Here, imaging-based CRISPR screening of the genome (to mutate genes of interest), allows cell-regulating molecules and modifications to be revealed in live and fixed cells. Primary cilia – whiskery functional projections found on most cell types – are studied here as a proof of concept and several previously unknown ciliary regulators identified and characterised, such as microprotein TZMP1. Shown are tadpole skin cells with cilia – left, unmanipulated and right, after CRISPR-targeting the gene encoding TZMP1

Read the published research article here

Video from work by Jingbo Sun and colleagues

Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

Video contributed by the authors and originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Developmental Cell, November 2025