Ciliopathy - History

History

Although non-motile or primary cilia were first described in 1898, "cell biologists largely ignored them." But "microscopists continued to document their presence in the cells of most vertebrate organisms." The "primary cilium was long considered--with few exceptions--to be a largely useless evolutionary vestige, a vestigial organelle. Recent research has revealed an initial understanding that cilia are essential to many of the body's organs". Many mammalian eukaryotic cells are ciliated with primary cilia. These primary cilia play important roles in chemosensation, mechanosensation, and thermosensation. Cilia may thus be "viewed as sensory cellular antennae that coordinate a large number of cellular signaling pathways, sometimes coupling the signaling to ciliary motility or alternatively to cell division and differentiation."

Recent advances in mammalian genetic research have facilitated the elucidation of a molecular basis for a number of dysfunctional mechanisms in both motile and primary cilia structures of the cell. "Numerous critical developmental signaling pathways" essential to cellular development have been discovered. These are principally but not exclusively found in the non-motile or primary cilia. A number of common observable characteristics of mammalian genetic disorders and diseases are caused by ciliary dysgenesis and dysfunction. Once identified, these characteristics thus describe a set of hallmarks of a ciliopathy.

Cilia have recently been implicated in a wide variety of human genetic diseases by "the discovery that numerous proteins involved in mammalian disease localize to the basal bodies and cilia." For example, in just a single area of human disease physiology, cystic renal disease, cilia-related genes and proteins have been identified to have causal effect in polycystic kidney disease, nephronophthisis, Senior-Loken syndrome type 5, orofaciodigital syndrome type 1 and Bardet-Biedl syndrome.