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Tubulins undergo several kinds of posttranslational modifications (PTMs) including glutamylation and glycylation. The contribution of these PTMs to the motilities of cilia and flagella is still unclear. Here, we investigated the role of tubulin glycylation by examining a novel Chlamydomonas mutant lacking TTLL3, an enzyme responsible for initiating glycylation. Immunostaining of cells and flagella revealed that glycylation is only restricted to the axonemal tubulin composing the outer-doublet but not the central-pair microtubules. Furthermore, the flagellar localization of TTLL3 was found to be dependent on intraflagellar transport. The mutant, ttll3(ex5), completely lacks glycylation and consequently exhibits slower swimming velocity compared with the wild-type strain. By combining the ttll3(ex5) mutation with multiple axonemal dynein-deficient mutants, we found that the lack of glycylation does not affect the motility of the outer-arm dynein lacking mutations. Sliding disintegration assay using isolated axonemes revealed that the lack of glycylation decreases microtubule sliding velocity in the normal axoneme but not in the axoneme lacking the outerarm dyneins. Based on our recent study that glycylation occurs exclusively on β-tubulin in Chlamydomonas, these findings suggest that tubulin glycylation controls flagellar motility through modulating outer-arm dyneins, presumably by neutralizing the negative charges of glutamate residues at the C-terminus region of β-tubulin.
Kubo et al. (Fri,) studied this question.