#ciliopathies

Close-up on Cilia

Almost every cell in your body has a little antenna sending and receiving chemical and mechanical signals. These thread-like projections are called primary cilia. To better understand the importance of these structures, researchers have tried to identify proteins located on them. However, this has proven challenging as primary cilia overlap with other cell structures such as the cell membrane. Now researchers have developed an effective way to definitively localise primary cilia’s proteins in 3D by combining surface scanning electron microscopy with antibody-based labelling (immuno-SEM). Here, a protein called IFT88 (white dots) – which if mutated can cause serious disorder – is revealed on a cilium on a mouse pancreatic cell. This powerful, high-resolution tool will aid research into primary cilia and ciliopathies – a range of serious diseases caused by cilia dysfunction.

Written by Lux Fatimathas

Image from work by Sanja Sviben and colleagues

Department of Cell Biology and Physiology, Washington University School of Medicine, Saint Louis, MO, USA

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Journal of Cell Science, May 2024

A Bigger Look

If you’re struggling to read text on your phone, you might simply expand it, so it’s easier to see. And you can do the same with biological matter, to better view the tiny structures of the body’s microscopic landscape. That’s the idea of expansion microscopy, which embeds biological samples on expandable gel and then images the results, able to see much more detail than using conventional methods. A new version carries out the process several times to achieve even finer resolution of cellular architecture, such as the cilia pictured, hair-like structures in the mouse eye that connect segments of photoreceptors essential for sight. They saw for the first time the regular pattern of a protein called CEP290 (blue), which could have implications for cilia-related diseases both in the eye, (such as Leber congenital amaurosis, which can lead to blindness from a young age), and beyond (like polycystic kidney disease).

Written by Anthony Lewis

Image made with Leica Microsystems

Image from work by Vincent Louvel and colleagues

Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Nature Communications, November 2023