Abstract
The fluctuating position of an optically trapped cilium tip under untreated and Taxol-treated conditions was used to characterize mechanical properties of the cilium axoneme and its basal body by combining experimental, analytical,and computational tools. We provide, for the first time, evidence that the persistence length of a ciliary axoneme is length-dependent; longer cilia are stiffer than shorter cilia. We demonstrate that this apparent length dependence can be understood by a combination of modeling axonemal microtubules as anisotropic elastic shells and including actomyosin-driven stochastic basal body motion.Our results also demonstrate the possibility of using observable ciliary dynamics to probe interior cytoskeletal dynamics. It is hoped that our improved characterization of cilia will result in deeper understanding of the biological function of cellular flow sensing by this organelle.
Highlights
Primary cilia are slender hair-like structures, several microns long and 0.2 μ m in diameter, present on most vertebrate cells, that protrude from the cell body into the extracellular space
We developed a coarse-grained computational model of the primary cilium to study the deformation and fluctuations of the cilium axoneme and the basal body based on dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) (Peng et al 2013)
Since we model the basal body as a rigid body described by the Langevin equation and model the remaining cellular components within the DPD framework, our model allows us to assign different temperatures for the Langevin equation and the hydrodynamic bath
Summary
Primary cilia are slender hair-like structures, several microns long and 0.2 μ m in diameter, present on most vertebrate cells, that protrude from the cell body into the extracellular space. The biological significance of this function remains unclear in part due to incomplete understanding of the dynamics of the cilium in the presence of flow (Lin et al 2003; Ma et al 2013; Delling et al 2016). We hypothesize that the mechanosensing function of cilia can occur by straining microtubule structural elements in a similar manner to actin-mediated mechanosensation (Mofrad and Kamm 2010). Preliminary results indicate that the basal body may have a role in differentiating mechanosensation from chemosensation (Jin et al 2013; Hu and Nelson 2011; Lin et al 2013)
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