Altered Calcium in Ciliary Dysfunction: Potential Role of Endoplasmic Reticulum Stress and Ciliophagy

What is it about?

Calcium signalling is essential in regulating ciliary beat frequency in healthy airways. This is greatly reduced by smoking which leads to loss of ciliary beating and ultimately negatively affecting mucociliary clearance in COPD. It is also known that there is a loss of cilia in COPD, the mechanisms regulating loss of cilia are not clearly understood. In addition to impaired calcium signaling in COPD, we propose enhanced ciliophagy as another mechanism that leads to the reduction of both cilia length and ciliary beat frequency in COPD.

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