Closing remarks before the banquet or from dynein Haul to dining hall

✍ Scribed by Satir, Peter

• Publisher: Wiley (John Wiley & Sons)
• Year: 1982
• Weight: 318 KB
• Volume: 2
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0271-6585
• DOI: 10.1002/cm.970020742

✦ Synopsis

In a spectacular setting with splendid weather, the 70 or so participants from nearly a dozen nations at the International Congress on Ciliary Motility and Mucociliary Transport set out to encircle a central pair of questions: 1) How precisely do cilia function to move mucus in the mammalian and human respiratory system? 2) By what basic mechanisms is the motive force for ciliary microtubule sliding generated and then transduced into propagated bending?

Each participant provided approaches to the present answers to these questions, answers which, though still incomplete, often produced considerable illumination of the problems. I emerge from these contributions with the impression that the field is moving from phenomenology to mechanism at a rapid rate, and that the mechanisms uncovered are intricate, subtle, and rather beautiful. The experiments to test them are often very elegant (one particularly clear example is Hiramoto's direct measurement of axonemal rigidity, performed on single beating axonemes in directions both in and perpendicular to the plane of motion), and the controversy surrounding their less established aspects is considerable and spirited. Students of the subject will take heart: There is plenty that remains to be done. Each reader will have a somewhat different view of what is especially valuable in this volume, and which of the partial answers is especially enlightening. I choose below a small but not insignificant number of thoughts that may be considered assembly points for the results of the meeting:

1 . This year, for the first time, there is information on the beat form, metachronal wave activity, and resting position of mammalian and indeed human cilia of comparable quality to that previously available for invertebrate material. The small size and difficulty in observing respiratory tract cilia that had defeated previous workers have not defeated Sanderson and Sleigh (J. Cell Sci. 47:331-347), and the papers by Sleigh and by Marino and Aiello (this volume) are important extensions of this work. Mucus-propelling cilia such as those of the respiratory tract rest between beat cycles at the end of their effective stroke. The beat cycle begins with the recovery stroke. The active cilia are coordinated locally into short metachronal waves that pass across only a few ciliated cells before they die away. Activity is recurrent. The metachronal wave is antilaeoplectic in character. Resting and recovering cilia lie beneath the mucus, and tips of cilia in their effective stroke reach up to penetrate the lower surface of the mucus. This coupling of the effective stroke to mucus propulsion is highly significant since, as Silberberg points out