Affiliation:
1. Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics , , Baltimore, MD 21205, USA
Abstract
ABSTRACT
In animals with germ plasm, specification of the germline involves ‘germ granules’, cytoplasmic condensates that enrich maternal transcripts in the germline founder cells. In Caenorhabditis elegans embryos, P granules enrich maternal transcripts, but surprisingly P granules are not essential for germ cell fate specification. Here, we describe a second condensate in the C. elegans germ plasm. Like canonical P-bodies found in somatic cells, ‘germline P-bodies’ contain regulators of mRNA decapping and deadenylation and, in addition, the intrinsically-disordered proteins MEG-1 and MEG-2 and the TIS11-family RNA-binding protein POS-1. Embryos lacking meg-1 and meg-2 do not stabilize P-body components, misregulate POS-1 targets, mis-specify the germline founder cell and do not develop a germline. Our findings suggest that specification of the germ line involves at least two distinct condensates that independently enrich and regulate maternal mRNAs in the germline founder cells.
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Funder
National Institutes of Health
National Science Foundation
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Publisher
The Company of Biologists
Subject
Developmental Biology,Molecular Biology
Cited by
7 articles.
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