Quantitative proteomic and phenotypic analysis of Chlamydomonas wild-type and lf4 mutant

Background: Normal health and development require cilia and flagella, which are essential organelles that are highly conserved across different species. The molecular mechanisms that regulate their assembly state, however, remain largely unknown. In <i>Chlamydomonas</i>, mutations in any of five long flagella (<i>lf</i>) genes result in cells that assemble flagella more than twice the length of wild-type cells. To learn more about the role of one of these genes, LF4 (which encodes a MAP kinase) we used a phenotypic analysis along with a global proteomic approach to identify differentially expressed proteins in the flagella and cell bodies of <i>lf4</i> and wild-type cells.