Science

C-Cilia in Motion!!

• Fascinating
• Relevant
• Ingenious

WHAT ARE CILIA?

Look around you! See the world. Smell it! Hear it! Touch it! What're you doing?

You are sensing the world you live in. And to do this, you are using special equipment like hands, eyes, tongues etc.

Now imagine that you are a tiny little cell in your body. To survive, you need to be able to sense the environment you are in. You need to find food, you need to sense danger and you need to communicate with other cells! What equipment will you use??

We know the answer to that one. The answer is a tiny whip like structure called the Cilium.

 Cilia are small hair like protrusions on the surface of cells. Almost ALL the cells in your body have one! And a lot of them have MORE than one! Infact, touching, tasting, seeing etc will all be impossible if the cilia in your cells weren't working properly. They aren't just required for processes at the level of the cell, but ALSO at the level of the entire organism.

Everything you do, Cilia are probably important for it!!

WHY SHOULD WE CARE?

Defects in cilia can cause a LOT of gruesome diseases in humans. Small faults in cilia can cause mental retardation, kidney cysts, urinary problems, obesity and a whole SUITE of other problems.

                     Child suffering from Meckel Syndrome

Clearly, it is important to study how cilia work in order to understand how we might fix them.

WHAT MY LAB DOES

Now, obviously, we can't go around ripping cilia out from humans! So we do a very clever thing. We find something that we can grow in the lab and which has cilia similar to humans. And that something is Chlamydomonas.

It's a single-celled green alga which has TWO flagella that we can pull off whenever we like without hurting the cell at all. And so we have an unlimited supply of cilia to study. We can do a lot of genetic and biochemical studies on these cilia and gather a wealth of information on how they are constructed and how they function.

WHAT IS THIS PROJECT?

The video outlines the specific study that we need your help with.

Briefly, we would like to make large quantities of two different building blocks (or proteins) of the cilia and then mix them together to see how they fit with each other. To do this, we'd need to clone the genes for these blocks and then make the genes produce the proteins (or building blocks) at a high rate. This will give us enough protein to be able to do the kind of experiments we want to do. These experiments in turn will elucidate the roles that each of these proteins play in the malfunctioning of cilia. Neat, isn't it?

Follow me on my project blog for more information.

Or on twitter to hear what i've been doing lately!

Or Like the project on FACEBOOK! You'll find Me there too :)

WHERE DOES YOUR MONEY GO?

Your generous donations, wonderful netizens, will go towards labour costs for performing the cloning and protein production experiments. Based on the results from this project, we'd be able to write a much larger grant which will help us expand the project in to a full-blown program.

 So help us in our quest to solve this puzzle!!

GEEK-SPEAK

For the geeks out there, here's some more info. You can skip this section if the tech details bore you.

We already have data from a yeast-2-hybrid screen that tells us that PF22 and Reptin probably interact. Now we want to clone the mammalian genes for both of these genes in to bacterial expression vectors, purify them, and test their in-vitro interactions using co-IP techniques to start out with.

REWARDS

As a token of our gratitude, there's a few rewards that we've devised for you!.

There's T-Shirts to be had!! Or your very own Chlamydomonas growing kit !!(They are a very pretty, bright green, and will be superb conversation started for your living room) Or access to the inner machinations of science!!

Every one who donates (even just a penny) gets free lab tours and and invite to join us on hunts for free food (Graduate students should have their own Bear Grylls-style survival show)! :D

P.S: The T-Shirts have a picture of two Chlamydomonas cells mating (OR in the parlance of the street, TOTALLY DOING IT!).... You KNOW you want one!!

                        'Chlamy having SEX' T-Shirt design!!
 

So please help us out with our research!! WE REALLY APPRECIATE IT!!

 Let's meet the #SciFund Challenge!!