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Cell biology

How cilia beat

Nature volume 463, pages 308–309 (2010)Cite this article

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Physics provides new approaches to difficult biological problems: a plausible mathematical model of how cilia and flagella beat has been formulated, but it needs to be subjected to rigorous experimental tests.

Motile cilia and flagella are thin, membrane-covered extensions of certain cells that generate a regular, beating waveform. This ancient motile mechanism powers the swimming of sperm and many small organisms, as well as the movement of mucus in human lungs and oviducts. How cilia beat is a long-standing puzzle, but fresh insight into the problem now comes from theoretical physics in the form of a series of papers by Frank Jülicher and colleagues1,2,3.

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Figure 1: Axoneme structure and dynein regulation.
Figure 2: Self-organized oscillations in a system of opposed motors and springs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. T. J. Mitchison is in the Department of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA. timothy_mitchison@hms.harvard.edu,

    T. J. Mitchison

  2. H. M. Mitchison is at the Institute of Child Health, University College London, London WC1N 1EH, UK. h.mitchison@ich.ucl.ac.uk ,

    H. M. Mitchison

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  1. T. J. Mitchison
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  2. H. M. Mitchison
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Mitchison, T., Mitchison, H. How cilia beat. Nature 463, 308–309 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/463308a

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