Skeleton Key

Alan Brown's lab reveals structures of skeletal components in hair-like cilia

image of structures of skeletal components in hair-like cilia

It’s not every day that scientists get to publish a paper on Halloween about a skeleton, but that’s what the laboratories of Alan Brown in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School and Rui Zhang at Washington University in St. Louis just did.

As reported in the Oct. 31 print issue of Cell, the collaborating teams mapped out the atomic structures of significant components of the cytoskeletons of cilia—hairlike appendages on cell surfaces that serve in critical roles as transporters and sensory signal antennae. 

Read the whole HMS article here.