Bungo Akiyoshi
@bungoakiyoshi
Studying kinetochores in African trypanosome (kinetoplastid) and marine plankton (diplonemid) in Edinburgh
Also reminded me how much I love sea. Hopefully working on a marine organism will increase the chance of seeing sea
These proteins can be used for immunoprecipitation/mass spec to identify many more components, which will be key to obtaining mechanistic understanding of the feeding apparatus in diplonemids and beyond. Any feedback welcome!
In this preprint, we report 17 components that localize to feeding apparatus or flagellar apparatus (yes I love YFP-tagging screens). The feeding apparatus in diplonemids consists of cytostome (cell mouth) and cytopharynx (gullet), continuous with reinforcing microtubules. Microtubules everywhere!!
Before that, I did not even know the terms like cytostome or cytopharynx. One reason I got interested in these structures is because Mad2 localizes at two of the three flagellar roots and reinforcing microtubules, which are important for flagellar pocket formation
And to repeat, I personally do not feel it is appropriate to use bacterial-origin proteins to determine the eukaryotic root. If you look at multiple sequence alignments of proteins used in Williamson 2025, the proteins look too conserved (while archaea proteins do not show that level of similarity)
I understand that using bacterial-origin genes clearly is clearly less prone to LBA. However, I am doubting the approach itself as I detailed in the paper.
My current view of early eukaryotic history. See Figure 1 in the paper
Congrats to all authors, especially Lim who had an impressive PhD viva last week! TAC is a very interesting structure linking mitochondrial DNA and basal bodies in trypanosomes
Crowds of Paradiplonema papillatum cells. Spot one metaphase and one anaphase cell
There are ~180 chromosomes in this diplonemid, which organize into two rings during mitosis. Chromosomal passenger complex proteins localize in between the rings. Indirect evidence suggests that the cell is in metaphase but the two rings are separated by up to 1 µm. How are they connected?
A masterpiece experiment by Rosenbaum et al 1969. I was so excited when I read about this but my classmates weren't.
Diplonema papillatum, which is a sister of euglenids. As far as I know, these two flagella have not been defined as anterior vs posterior (both come out of anterior end of the cell). This picture is from Wikipedia. EM studies say these two look nearly identical en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplone...
The world is full of crazy and sad news, but here is a protein that localizes to only one of the two flagella