Ciliary Targeting

Beyond the Golgi, we are also interested in how proteins are targeted to the ciliary membrane, a specialized extension of the plasma membrane enriched with sensory proteins. Despite intense investigation, the molecular basis of ciliary targeting remains unclear. We discovered that transportin1, Rab8, and ciliary targeting sequences form a ternary complex for trafficking ciliary membrane proteins (Madugula et al., J. Cell Sci., 2016; Mahajan et al., J. Biol. Chem., 2023). We also proposed a Rab-importin-based retention mechanism at the cilium, analogous to nuclear transport (Lu and Madugula, Cell Mol. Life Sci., 2017), explaining how ciliary proteins can be highly mobile yet concentrated within the cilium.