Moonlighting in the cilium

We have shown that unravelling moonlighting functions of ciliary proteins will delineate the evolutionary origin of such proteins and therewith of the cilium itself. It is also be essential to determine the molecular function of such proteins, like the ciliary protein Prominin, which also occurs in microvilli in human and in non-ciliary stages of Plasmodium species providing clues for its membrane curvature associated function in the cilium. (1) We will use various ML methods, ranging from Bayesian integration to AI methods on the abundance of ‘omics data, including data from the consortium like BioID data and image data, to find ciliary proteins that behave “atypical” in such data because they have non-ciliary functions, like the loss of the cilium in Netamorphs species that has retained “ciliary” genes with moonlighting functions. (2) We will use moonlighting functions of ciliary proteins to explain the variation of phenotypes of mutations in ciliary genes, and we will quantify whether moonlighting proteins tend to be duplicated in other species and therewith represent an intermediate stage of evolution.