Cellular biology student Swati Suryavanshi publishes on ciliary motility

A new publication in Current Biology, by Swati Suryavanshi, a cellular biology graduate student in the Gaertig lab, identifies a novel mechanism of regulation of dynein motors inside cilia. The beating of cilia is dependent on dynein motors that slide microtubules. How the pattern of ciliary bending is determined is not known. Swati and a team of colleagues from UGA, Emory University, Miami University OH, SUNY at Buffalo NY, and CRBM Montpellier, show that in the ciliated model Tetrahymena thermophila, dyneins are regulated by a post-translational mark present on ciliary microtubules called tubulin glutamylation, and that this regulation is critical for both the waveform and beat frequency. In the same issue of Current Biology, Kubo and colleagues from the University of Tokyo publish similar observations that were independently obtained in another unicellular model, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. Both papers reveal a conserved mechanism of that regulates ciliary motility based on a post-translational marks on microtubules that act as an inhibitor of the force production contributed by inner dynein arms.