Intraflagellar transport (IFT) is the rapid, bidirectional movement of granule-like particles along the length of eukaryotic cilia and flagella (
Rosenbaum and Witman, 2002 
). IFT was first observed in the biflagellate green algae
Chlamydomonas by differential interference contrast (DIC) microscopy (
Kozminski et al., 1993 
). It also has been directly observed in the sensory cilia of
Caenorhabditis elegans (
Orozco et al., 1999 
;
Signor et al., 1999 
;
Qin et al., 2001 
) and in the primary cilia of mammalian kidney cells using green fluorescent protein–tagged IFT-particle proteins (Pazour, unpublished results). These IFT particles are moved in an anterograde direction from the cell body to the flagellar tip by kinesin-II (
Kozminski et al., 1995 
) and then moved in a retrograde direction from the tip back to the cell body by cytoplasmic dynein 2/1b (
Pazour et al., 1999 
;
Porter et al., 1999 
;
Signor et al., 1999 
). Studies in
Chlamydomonas show that the IFT particles contain ~16 different polypeptides with masses 20–172 kDa, which are organized into two complexes, A and B (
Piperno and Mead, 1997 
;
Cole et al., 1998 
;
Cole, 2003 
). Homologues of these IFT-particle proteins are found in all ciliated organisms.
As a conserved process, IFT is important for assembly, maintenance, and normal function of flagella and cilia.
Chlamydomonas cells with mutations in the genes encoding IFT motor subunits or IFT-particle proteins are nonmotile and either have no flagella or short flagella (
Pazour et al., 2000 
;
Brazelton et al., 2001 
). IFT transports flagellar precursors to the tip and returns turnover products to the cell body (
Qin et al., 2004 
). IFT also is involved in mating (
Pan and Snell, 2002 
) and flagella length control (
Marshall and Rosenbaum, 2001 
) in
Chlamydomonas. In the nematode
C. elegans and the fly
Drosophila melanogaster, mutations in genes encoding IFT-particle proteins and IFT motors affect the formation and function of the sensory cilia (
Collet et al., 1998 
;
Cole et al., 1998 
;
Cole, 2003 
;
Han et al., 2003 
;
Haycraft et al., 2003 
;
Sarpal et al., 2003 
). In the mouse, IFT defects cause a range of diseases including polycystic kidney disease, retinal degeneration, the laterality abnormality situs inversus (
Pazour and Rosenbaum, 2002 
), and male sterility (San Agustin
et al., unpublished results). Recent data on two mouse mutants,
wimple (
wim) and
flexo (
fxo), which are alleles of the mouse homologues of
Chlamydomonas IFT172 and
IFT88, show that the IFT machinery has an essential and vertebrate-specific role in Hedgehog signal transduction (
Huangfu et al., 2003 
).
Although conserved among organisms and important in numerous cell types, the mechanism of IFT is not well understood. Studies from
Chlamydomonas and
C. elegans show that two dynein subunit genes are necessary for retrograde IFT. One encodes LC8, which is a light chain of several dynein isoforms and thus is presumably a subunit of the retrograde IFT motor (
King et al., 1996 
;
Pazour et al., 1998 
). The other encodes DHC1b, which is a cytoplasmic dynein heavy chain (DHC) isoform (
Pazour et al., 1999 
;
Porter et al., 1999 
;
Signor et al., 1999 
). Its mammalian ortholog, DHC2, is associated with mammalian cilia (
Mikami et al., 2002 
) and also was reported to play a role in the organization and/or function of the Golgi apparatus (
Vaisberg et al., 1996 
).
Dyneins are typically large multisubunit complexes. For example, conventional cytoplasmic dynein 1 (a.k.a. dynein 1a in invertebrates) is composed of two heavy chains (DHC1/1a), 2 or 3 intermediate chains, several light intermediate chains (LICs), and numerous light chains (
King, 2000 
;
Reilein et al., 2001 
). It is likely that the retrograde IFT motor also contains subunits in addition to LC8 and DHC1b. Recently, a novel dynein LIC, D2LIC, was identified as a bona fide component of cytoplasmic dynein 2 in mammalian cells (
Grissom et al., 2002 
) and was inferred to play a role in maintaining Golgi organization by binding cytoplasmic dynein 2 to its Golgi-associated cargo. Like dynein 1 LICs, mammalian D2LIC contains a phosphate-binding domain (P-loop) at its N-terminus; although P-loop domains are involved in binding the β,γ-phosphate group of ATP or GTP in many nucleotide-binding and -hydrolyzing proteins (
Via et al., 2000 
), it is not known if this domain has any physiological role in dynein LICs.
Independently of the present study, the
Chlamydomonas homologue of D2LIC was recently cloned and shown to be associated with DHC1b (
Perrone et al., 2003 
), although its function was not examined. In
C. elegans, the D2LIC homologue is XBX-1; deletion of XBX-1 resulted in stunted sensory cilia that accumulated IFT-particle proteins, suggesting that XBX-1 functions in retrograde IFT (Shafer
et al., 2003). Surprisingly, however, XBX-1 accumulated, along with IFT-particle proteins, in the short sensory cilia of the
C. elegans che-3 mutant (Shafer
et al., 2003), which is defective in DHC1b/DHC2, but did not accumulate with the IFT-particle proteins in the short flagella of a
Chlamydomonas DHC1b mutant (
Perrone et al., 2003 
). Moreover, the P-loop that is conserved in mammalian and
Chlamydomonas D2LIC homologues is absent in
C. elegans XBX-1. These observations raise the possibility that the D2LIC homologues function differently in
C. elegans, Chlamydomonas, and humans.
The current study, using
Chlamydomonas reinhardtii as a model system, was undertaken to learn more about the role of this LIC in IFT and the possible function of its P-loop. We cloned the
Chlamydomonas ortholog of mammalian D2LIC, which we term D1bLIC. Using D1bLIC cDNA as a probe, we identified a
Chlamydomonas d1blic insertional mutant and characterized the mutant phenotype. We further analyzed the relationship between D1bLIC and DHC1b by immunostaining, flagellar fractionation, and coimmunoprecipitation. Finally, we used site-directed mutagenesis to investigate the function of the D1bLIC P-loop in IFT in vivo. Portions of this work were reported previously in abstract form (
Hou et al., 2002 
).