What is it about?
Deep inside nearly every eukaryotic cell are centrioles: microscopic hubs that organize cell division and build the base for cilia, the hair-like structures cells use to move fluid, sense surroundings, or swim (in sperm). Each centriole starts as a nine-spoked "cartwheel" built from a protein called SAS-6, but how copies of SAS-6 lock together to form this precise structure has been unclear for decades. To find out, researchers used cryo-electron tomography to image Trichonympha, wood-digesting termite gut microbes with unusually long cartwheel sections. They discovered that the cartwheel structure stacks in zigzagging rings to assemble the cartwheel structure.
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Why is it important?
Centrioles are essential for healthy cells; when they don't form correctly, this opens the door for things to go wrong, from developmental disorders to infertility to certain cancers. Since the cartwheel is the first scaffold that a new centriole is built upon, understanding its assembly is key to understanding how cells can organize themselves.
Perspectives
This study gives us the clearest picture yet of the cartwheel inside a living cell. Since the cartwheel is found from algae to humans, what we’ve learned here likely applies to us too, offering a foundation for understanding centriole-related disease in our own bodies, and getting one step closer to understanding the cell as a whole.
Khanh Huy Bui
McGill University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The native structure of the
Trichonympha
centriole cartwheel reveals a zigzag stacking pattern, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, September 2026, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2612170123.
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