Primary cilium emerges as key player in brain development, offering clues to disorders

Ciliopathies affect patients with kidney problems, obesity, and brain abnormalities; reduced understanding of these conditions has limited treatment options.

For most of a century, the primary cilium — a hair-like antenna on nearly every human cell — was dismissed as a biological leftover, a structure that evolution had simply forgotten to remove. Now, research from the University of California, Riverside, published in Cell Reports, suggests these organelles are not relics but architects, quietly shaping the developing brain and, when broken, giving rise to a constellation of diseases that have long resisted explanation. In finding unexpected proteins inside cilia — and hints that cilia may even manufacture proteins themselves — scientists are not

Primary cilium emerges as key player in brain development, offering clues to disorders

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