The kinesin-4 protein KIF27 forms a cytoskeletal scaffold at the transition zone to promote motile cilia structural integrity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Motile cilia are eukaryotic organelles with essential chemo- and mechanosensing functions across evolution, from single cell organisms to humans. Motile cilia of the mammalian nervous, respiratory, and reproductive systems are characterized by unique motility proteins to generate fluid flow essential for transporting metabolites and removing mucus. The molecular mechanism underlying motile cilia assembly remains unknown. Here, we use high-resolution imaging, proteomics, in situ cryotomography, and single-molecule motility assays to identify mammalian KIF27, a motor protein of the Kinesin-4 family and homologue of the Hedgehog pathway regulator COS2/KIF7, as a key regulator of motile cilia assembly in vivo. We show that KIF27 promotes the integrity of the transition zone (TZ), a diffusion barrier situated at the cilium base. Loss of KIF27 results in specific and profound defects in axonemal structure and disrupts cilia beating, which collectively lead to organismal phenotypes that recapitulate primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD). We show that the motile properties of KIF27 are dispensable for its function in motile cilia assembly. Instead, KIF27 acts as a microtubule scaffold to regulate the TZ architecture and enable correct ciliary incorporation of motility-generating proteins. Given that KIF27 orthologues exist in different evolutionarily lineages, we propose that the ancestral activity of KIF27/KIF7 kinesins was to form a microtubule-associated scaffold for protein-protein interactions pertinent to cilia formation and signaling. The transition-zone-associated KIF27 activities may represent a general building principle for the motile cilia assembly in diverse species and cell types.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".