Sick

Well it was bound to happen. Trish and I have come down with our first German cold. Turns out they are a lot like American colds, sniffles mixed with coughing and general aches and pains.

Now our ancestors did not have that problem. I am talking way back. The ancestor we share with plants. The ancestor that could live without an atmosphere of oxygen. It turns out at the meeting Keith Gull pointed out that this ancestor must have been motile. Swimming around, checking things out, changing his surroundings for a better life. He said this because at the base of all cilia and flagella, whether an organism is green or pale, at the base is a body that contains this beautiful structure called a centriole. It has wonderful 9-fold symmetry. The remarkable fact is that through the millennium, the basic structure and the proteins that regulate its assembly and growth have been conserved. So one can look at planaria, flat worms, or chlamydomonas, a green algae, or C. elegans, a worm, or Zebra fish, or fruit flies or mice or humans, and there is this great unity of chemistry and structure. In all the model organisms you study aspects of the role and function of centrioles and directly apply the knowledge to humans.

For your info, Keith Gull is a leader in the study of the cilia in trypanosomes. If you are interesting in the fascinating field of ciliopathies click here.
Oh I should mention that many of our cells have cilia. Some are involved in locomotion, but others are sensory. Tickle some cells, and its the cilia that say haha. I made that last part up.

But how does that have to do with us and centrosomes. Well you remember that centrosomes are those piers organizing the fishing lines. Well cilia contain a bunch of microtubules and the centrioles are key in forming the pier at the base of the cilia, as well as forming the pier at the centrosome. I should note though, that sadly, yeast have replaced the centriole with a more modest structure for organizing the microtubules, a structure know as the spindle pole body. All these structures though have microtubules, and at the start of the microtubules they all have a complex called the gamma-tubulin complex. Think of it like the fishing reel, except instead of spooling the line, it makes it. Maybe that is not so clear, but the centrosome and the spindle body are the points of manufacture for the lines, the microtubules, as well as the place they get organized. Pretty handy structure.