Defects in cilia in humans have long been known to cause the severe inherited disorder primary ciliary dyskinesia; more recent evidence has implicated cilia in polycystic kidney disease (PKD), retinal degeneration, obesity syndromes, and developmental disorders (
Pazour and Rosenbaum, 2002;
Ong and Wheatley, 2003;
Scholey, 2003;
Snell et al., 2004;
Pazour, 2004). Cilia and flagella, which are essentially identical organelles and hereafter referred to interchangeably, also are essential to the life cycles of many human and animal parasites, including those that cause malaria, African sleeping sickness, Chagas' disease, and giardiosis. Some cilia, such as airway cilia and sperm tails, move; others are nonmotile and serve as sensory antennae (
Pazour and Witman, 2003). Structurally, the cilium () consists of a microtubular axoneme ensheathed by a ciliary membrane that is continuous with the plasma membrane of the cell. The axoneme of motile cilia includes substructures such as the dynein arms and radial spokes that generate and control axonemal bending. The cilium also contains “matrix” proteins that are not tightly associated with either the membrane or the axoneme, including proteins involved in intraflagellar transport (IFT), a process required for assembly and maintenance of the organelle (
Rosenbaum and Witman, 2002).
An understanding of how cilia carry out their functions and of their role in disease will require increased knowledge of their protein composition. Previous two-dimensional gel electrophoretic analyses of isolated flagella from the green alga
Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, a genetically tractable organism that has many advantages for biochemical and molecular genetic studies of the flagellum, revealed that flagella contain more than 250 proteins (
Luck and Piperno, 1989;
Dutcher, 1995), of which only ~100 have been characterized at the molecular level. Recently, the availability of complete genome sequences has made possible global approaches to the identification of genes encoding ciliary and flagellar proteins. For example, by comparing the genomes of ciliated versus nonciliated organisms,
Avidor-Reiss et al. (2004) and
Li et al. (2004) identified 187 and 688 genes, respectively, that are present in the former but not the latter; these are candidates for encoding flagellar and basal body components. In a different approach,
Stolc et al. (2005) used a gene chip to examine the level of induction of all
C. reinhardtii genes after deflagellation; they identified 220 genes that were induced at least 100% and therefore likely to be involved in the assembly or function of ciliary or flagellar proteins.
Although the above approaches can provide very valuable information on proteins associated with cilia and basal bodies, they are a complement to and not a substitute for direct proteomic analyses using mass spectrometry (MS). For example, comparative genomic approaches cannot readily identify genes encoding flagellar proteins, such as kinesins and many signal transduction proteins, that have close homologues in plants, and examination of gene induction during flagellar regeneration is likely to miss many proteins that function in both the flagellum and cytoplasm. In contrast, such proteins can be readily identified by a proteomics approach, which also can uniquely provide an indication of the abundance of a protein and its distribution in the flagellum. A preliminary proteomic analysis of detergent-extracted ciliary axonemes from cultured human bronchial epithelial cells identified 214 proteins (
Ostrowski et al., 2002); however, this study was compromised by the presence of other cellular structures in the axonemal preparation, and by limitations in the amount of material available and/or sequence data obtained, with the result that only 89 of the proteins were identified by more than a single peptide. Here, we use MS to identify the proteins in biochemically fractionated
C. reinhardtii flagella, which are available in large amounts and in high purity.