A role for primary cilia in coral calcification?
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A role for primary cilia in coral calcification? Eric Tambutté1 · Philippe Ganot1 · Alexander A Venn1 · Sylvie Tambutté1 Received: 9 July 2020 / Accepted: 5 November 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Cilia are evolutionarily conserved organelles that extend from the surface of cells and are found in diverse organisms from protozoans to multicellular organisms. Motile cilia play various biological functions by their beating motion, including mixing fluids and transporting food particles. Non-motile cilia act as sensors that signal cells about their microenvironment. In corals, cilia have been described in some of the cell layers but never in the calcifying epithelium, which is responsible for skeleton formation. In the present study, we used scanning electron microscopy and immunolabelling to investigate the cellular ciliature of the different tissue layers of the coral Stylophora pistillata, with a focus on the calcifying calicoblastic ectoderm. We show that the cilium of the calcifying cells is different from the cilium of the other cell layers. It is much shorter, and more importantly, its base is structurally distinct from the base observed in cilia of the other tissue layers. Based on these structural observations, we conclude that the cilium of the calcifying cells is a primary cilium. From what is known in other organisms, primary cilia are sensors that signal cells about their microenvironment. We discuss the implications of the presence of a primary cilium in the calcifying epithelium for our understanding of the cellular physiology driving coral calcification and its environmental sensitivity. Keywords Cilium · Biomineralization · Acetylated tubulin · Scanning electron microscopy · Calicoblastic ectoderm
Introduction Cilia, or flagella, are evolutionarily conserved organelles that extend from the surface of cells and exist in diverse organisms from protozoans to multicellular organisms (Davis et al. 2006; Singla and Reiter 2006; Song et al. 2016). The structure of the cilium is based on the axoneme, a columnar array of microtubules that are templated directly by the mother centriole of the centrosome, often termed the basal body. Cilia can be classified into groups by whether they have a 9 + 2 or a 9 + 0 arrangement of axonemal microtubules and by the presence or absence of motility. Although assigned different names to reflect their different beating motions, cilia and flagella are structurally similar (the two names are sometimes used interchangeably (Singla and Reiter 2006), but here, we will use the term cilia). Generally speaking, 9 + 2 structures are motile and can be present as numerous cilia on the cell surface, and 9 + 0 structures are not motile * Sylvie Tambutté [email protected] 1
Marine Biology Department, Centre Scientifique de Monaco, 8 Quai Antoine 1°, 98000 Monaco, Monaco
and occur as a monocillium on the cell surface, though this is not a hard and fast rule (Bloodgood 2009). Establishing the link between the axonemal microtubule structure, the moti
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