Tamara Caspary
Emory University, GA·Genetics
Almost every vertebrate cell has a primary cilium, a slender projection that acts like an antenna for signals from neighboring cells. Cilia are clearly essential for this cell-to-cell communication, but how they do it remains unclear.
- Fields
Genetics
Biology
Biochemistry
- Topics
primary cilia
ciliogenesis
small GTPase
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Dec 2027
What they work on
- Define the ciliary cAMP signaling signature in kidney epithelial cells that express only a cilia-excluded variant of ARL13B, a small GTPase concentrated in primary cilia.
- Use optogenetics to switch on cAMP signaling inside normal and ARL13B-excluded cilia, then compare their RNA and protein compositions.
- Test how ciliary cAMP signaling remodels cell shape in cells lacking ciliary ARL13B using 3D cultures, and whether ciliary membrane phospholipids regulate cAMP/ARL13B signaling.
- Use mouse models, including mice expressing only cilia-excluded ARL13B and point mutants in its GTPase domain, to separate ARL13B's roles in ciliogenesis, ciliary protein traffic and Sonic hedgehog signaling during neural development.
- Map regulatory relationships between ARL13B and related proteins found in forward genetic screens, along with other ARL family GTPases, in vivo and in specific cell types.
More about the research
Removing a cilium or a ciliary protein wipes out every function at once, so it is hard to tell what happens inside the cilium from what happens in the rest of the cell. Both projects build on a tool from the lab: a version of ARL13B that cannot enter cilia but keeps its known biochemical activity. ARL13B is a small regulatory GTPase, a molecular switch protein that is highly enriched in cilia. This variant lets researchers separate ARL13B's ciliary job from its other roles.
Why it matters
Defects in cilia and in Sonic hedgehog signaling are linked to human disease. Separating what happens inside the cilium from what happens elsewhere in the cell gives basic knowledge that could eventually guide treatments for disorders of abnormal cilia or Shh signaling. The mouse lines and cell tools could also serve other labs studying cilia and cell communication.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Tomoharu Kanie
University of Oklahoma-Health Sciences Center, OK·Biology
Isolate the ciliary vesicle using RAB34, a vesicle-marking switch protein, and NCS1, which captures the vesicle at the cilium base, and identify the vesicle's lipid and protein composition.
Visvanathan Ramamurthy
West Virginia University, WV·Neuroscience
Identify the best AAV gene therapy regimen for PROM1-associated blindness, delivering working gene copies with a harmless virus in animal models that mimic the disease and measuring retinal light responses by electrophysiology.
Helen Willsey
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Neuroscience·Early-career
Determine how SYNGAP1 gene dosage affects cilia formation and Hedgehog signaling in human neural progenitor cells before synapses form, and how this changes their proliferation and differentiation.
The school
Emory University: 70 labs on PI Pages, $1.2B a year on research, 286 research doctorates a year.
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