Ubiquitin tag for sperm mitochondria

Peter Sutovsky, Ricardo D. Moreno, João Ramalho-Santos, Tanja Dominko, Calvin Simerly and Gerald Schatten ()
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Peter Sutovsky: Oregon Health Sciences University
Ricardo D. Moreno: International Center for Cancer Research and Developmental Biology
João Ramalho-Santos: Center for Neuroscience, University of Coimbra
Tanja Dominko: Oregon Health Sciences University
Calvin Simerly: Oregon Health Sciences University
Gerald Schatten: Oregon Health Sciences University

Nature, 1999, vol. 402, issue 6760, 371-372

Abstract: Abstract Like other mammals, humans inherit mitochondria from the mother only, even though the sperm contributes nearly one hundred mitochondria to the fertilized egg. In support of the idea that this strictly maternal inheritance of mitochondrial DNA arises from the selective destruction of sperm mitochondria1,2, we show here that sperm mitochondria inside fertilized cow and monkey eggs are tagged by the recycling marker protein ubiquitin3. This imprint is a death sentence that is written during spermatogenesis and executed after the sperm mitochondria encounter the egg's cytoplasmic destruction machinery.

Date: 1999
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DOI: 10.1038/46466

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