Splitting Hairs

Bad hair days can feel like disasters, but it could be worse. As well as the hair on our heads, we have countless microscopic hair-like structures, called cilia, lining inner passageways of our body, and when they’re out of place a whole range of conditions, from kidney disease to deafness, can arise. Since they can’t be trimmed by a hairdresser, these tiny protrusions manage their own number and length, and scientists want to better understand this process. To investigate, researchers suppressed the activity of a particular protein thought to be involved, in Tetrahymena, a single-celled organism covered in cilia. Without the key protein, the cells grew fewer, longer cilia (right) than normal (left), revealing an important regulatory role. Understanding how length is controlled could be the first step in developing new treatments to intervene when growth goes wrong, and ensure there’s not a single cilium out of place.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Yu-Yang Jiang and colleagues
• Department of Cellular Biology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA
• Image originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS Genetics, July 2019