Biology Commons^™

The Structure And Symmetry Of The Radial Spoke Protein Complex In Chlamydomonas Flagella, Emiliya Poghosyan, Ioan Iacovache, Lenka Faltova, Alexander Leitner, Pinfen Yang, Dennis R. Diener, Ruedi Aebersold, Benoit Zuber, Takashi Ishikawa

Biological Sciences Faculty Research and Publications

The radial spoke is a key element in a transducer apparatus controlling the motility of eukaryotic cilia. The transduction biomechanics is a long-standing question in cilia biology. The radial spoke has three regions – a spoke head, a bifurcated neck and a stalk. Although the neck and the stalk are asymmetric, twofold symmetry of the head has remained controversial. In this work we used single particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) analysis to generate a 3D structure of the whole radial spoke at unprecedented resolution. We show the head region at 15 Å (1.5 nm) resolution and confirm twofold symmetry. Using distance …