Sign Hair

Like your bold new haircut sends a message to all around you, tiny hairs on the surface of cells send and receive messages to and from their neighbours and environment. These structures – cilia – are ubiquitous and when their development falters all manner of serious conditions around the body result. Recent research has improved understanding of how cilia take shape, but how and when key receptor components slot in is still poorly understood. A study investigated cilia on sensory cells involved in smell (visible around the developing fruit fly larva section pictured), and discovered that Orco, an odour receptor on the cilia, specifically slots in at a precise moment of development. It is escorted into place at just the right time by a motor protein known to drive cilia formation. These details about the tight regulation reveal fundamental properties of cilia production, which could ultimately help prevent it going wrong.

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.

Website

• Image from work by Swadhin Chandra Jana, Priya Dutta and Akanksha Jain, and colleagues
• National Centre for Biological Sciences, TIFR, Bengaluru, India and Department of Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, India
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS Genetics, August 2021