Germline inherited small RNAs facilitate the clearance of untranslated maternal mRNAs in C. elegans embryos

Piergiuseppe Quarato, Meetali Singh, Eric Cornes, Blaise Li, Loan Bourdon, Florian Mueller, Celine Didier and Germano Cecere ()
Additional contact information
Piergiuseppe Quarato: Institut Pasteur, Mechanisms of Epigenetic Inheritance, Department of Developmental and Stem Cell Biology, UMR3738, CNRS, 75724
Meetali Singh: Institut Pasteur, Mechanisms of Epigenetic Inheritance, Department of Developmental and Stem Cell Biology, UMR3738, CNRS, 75724
Eric Cornes: Institut Pasteur, Mechanisms of Epigenetic Inheritance, Department of Developmental and Stem Cell Biology, UMR3738, CNRS, 75724
Blaise Li: Institut Pasteur, Mechanisms of Epigenetic Inheritance, Department of Developmental and Stem Cell Biology, UMR3738, CNRS, 75724
Loan Bourdon: Institut Pasteur, Mechanisms of Epigenetic Inheritance, Department of Developmental and Stem Cell Biology, UMR3738, CNRS, 75724
Florian Mueller: Institut Pasteur, Imaging and Modeling Unit, UMR 3691 CNRS, C3BI USR 3756 IP CNRS, 75724
Celine Didier: Institut Pasteur, Mechanisms of Epigenetic Inheritance, Department of Developmental and Stem Cell Biology, UMR3738, CNRS, 75724
Germano Cecere: Institut Pasteur, Mechanisms of Epigenetic Inheritance, Department of Developmental and Stem Cell Biology, UMR3738, CNRS, 75724

Nature Communications, 2021, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-14

Abstract: Abstract Inheritance and clearance of maternal mRNAs are two of the most critical events required for animal early embryonic development. However, the mechanisms regulating this process are still largely unknown. Here, we show that together with maternal mRNAs, C. elegans embryos inherit a complementary pool of small non-coding RNAs that facilitate the cleavage and removal of hundreds of maternal mRNAs. These antisense small RNAs are loaded into the maternal catalytically-active Argonaute CSR-1 and cleave complementary mRNAs no longer engaged in translation in somatic blastomeres. Induced depletion of CSR-1 specifically during embryonic development leads to embryonic lethality in a slicer-dependent manner and impairs the degradation of CSR-1 embryonic mRNA targets. Given the conservation of Argonaute catalytic activity, we propose that a similar mechanism operates to clear maternal mRNAs during the maternal-to-zygotic transition across species.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21691-6 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:12:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-021-21691-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-21691-6

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().