Discovery-driven proteomics provide novel insights into ciliary biology

Cilia and flagella have been carefully observed and described since the dawn of the microscopy era. However, their constituent proteins were not widely studied by cell biologists until the pivotal discovery that mammalian primary cilia are not “vestigial organelles,” as was once believed, but instead are crucial regulators of human health. As the field of ciliary biology has grown in the last two decades, there has been a simultaneous rapid expansion in the capabilities of functional proteomics. High-throughput proteomic techniques have provided key insights into the proteins that build and maintain cilia. In Chapter 1, I provide an overview of some of the most impactful insights gained from ciliary proteomic studies. In Chapter 2, I describe my work using a new high-throughput proteomic technique to systematically identify changes in cellular proteomic organization when a gene required for proper ciliary function is lost. Finally, in Chapter 3, I provide an overview of the main contributions of my work, which has provided new insights into ciliary biology while also further developing robust and broadly applicable proteomic tools.