Understanding Intraflagellar Transport Assemblies

The cilium is an antenna-like structure found on the surface of almost all cells in our body where it can sense signals from the environment and transmit these signals to the inside of the cell. The cilium is constructed by a process working inside the cell known as intraflagellar transport that traffics ciliary proteins using molecular motors. Mutations in genes encoding intraflagellar transport proteins result in many different diseases known as ciliopathies. The aim of this research project is to understand at the molecular level how the intraflagellar transport machinery is assembled and how it functions to construct the cilium antenna on our cells.