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Primary cilia play a vital role in cellular sensing and signaling. An essential component of ciliogenesis is intraflagellar transport (IFT), which is involved in IFT protein recruitment, axonemal engagement of IFT protein complexes, and so on. The mechanistic understanding of these processes at the ciliary base was largely missing, because it is challenging to observe the motion of IFT proteins in this crowded region using conventional microscopy. Here, we report short-trajectory tracking of IFT proteins at the base of mammalian primary cilia by optimizing single-particle tracking photoactivated localization microscopy for IFT88-mEOS4b in live human retinal pigment epithelial cells. Intriguingly, we found that mobile IFT proteins “switched gears” multiple times from the distal appendages (DAPs) to the ciliary compartment (CC), moving slowly in the DAPs, relatively fast in the proximal transition zone (TZ), slowly again in the distal TZ, and then much faster in the CC. They could travel through the space between the DAPs and the axoneme without following DAP structures. We further revealed that BBS2 and IFT88 were highly populated at the distal TZ, a potential assembly site. Together, our live-cell single-particle tracking revealed region-dependent slowdown of IFT proteins at the ciliary base, shedding light on staged control of ciliary homeostasis.

molecular biology of the cell

Single-particle tracking localization microscopy reveals nonaxonemal dynamics of intraflagellar transport proteins at the base of mammalian primary cilia