Coordination of eukaryotic cilia and flagella

Propulsion by slender cellular appendages called cilia and flagella is an ancient means of locomotion. Unicellular organisms evolved myriad strategies to propel themselves in fluid environments, often involving significant differences in flagella number, localisation and modes of actuation. Remarkably, these appendages are highly conserved, occurring in many complex organisms such as humans, where they may be found generating physiological flows when attached to surfaces (e.g. airway epithelial cilia), or else conferring motility to male gametes (e.g. undulations of sperm flagella). Where multiple cilia arise, their movements are often observed to be highly coordinated. Here I review the two main mechanisms for motile cilia coordination, namely, intracellular and hydrodynamic, and discuss their relative importance in different ciliary systems.

• Publication year

  2018

• Venue

  Essays in Biochemistry

• Publication date

  2018-11-21

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1042/EBC20180029PMID 30464007PMCID 6281475
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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