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A Restricted Role for Sperm-borne MicroRNAs in Mammalian Fertilization

ABSTRACT: Prototypical micro RNAs (miRNAs) are 21~25-base-pair RNAs that regulate differentiation, carcinogenesis and pluripotency by eliminating mRNAs or blocking their translation, processes collectively termed RNA interference (RNAi). RNAi mediated by miRNAs regulates early development in zebrafish, and mouse embryos lacking the miRNA precursor processor, Dicer, are inviable. However, the role of miRNAs during mammalian fertilization is unknown. We here show using microarrays that miRNAs are present in mouse sperm structures that enter the oocyte at fertilization. Sperm contained a broad profile of miRNAs and a subset of potential mRNA targets were expressed in fertilizable, metaphase II (mII) oocytes. Oocytes contained transcripts for the RNAinduced silencing complex (RISC) catalytic subunit, EIF2C3 (formerly AGO3). However, levels of sperm-borne miRNA (measured by quantitative PCR) were apparently low relative to those of unfertilized, mII oocytes, and fertilization did not alter the part of the mII oocyte miRNA landscape that included the most abundant sperm-borne miRNAs. Coinjection of mII oocytes with sperm heads plus anti-miRNAs - to suppress miRNA function - did not perturb pronuclear activation or preimplantation development. Contrastingly, we provide evidence that nuclear transfer by microinjection alters the miRNA profile of enucleated oocytes. These data argue that sperm-borne prototypical miRNAs play a limited role, if any, in mammalian fertilization or early preimplantation development. Keywords: miRNA profiling

ORGANISM(S): Mus musculus

PROVIDER: GSE4011 | GEO | 2006/09/06

SECONDARY ACCESSION(S): PRJNA95105

REPOSITORIES: GEO

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Project description:Purpose: Next-generation sequencing (NGS) has revolutionized systems-based analysis of cellular pathways. The goals of this study are to compare small non-coding RNA profiling (snRNA-seq) in WT oocyte, sperm and 2PN stage embryos to those sperm and 2PN stage embryos derived from WT, Dicer cKO and Drosha cKO. We further study the roles of sperm-borne small RNA on fertilization and pre-implantation embryonic development. Methods: Small RNA profiles of adult wild-type (WT) oocytes, adult WT sperm, 2PN stage embryos, adult Dicer cKO/Drosha cKO sperm, 2PN stage embryos were generated by deep sequencing in duplicate, using Ion Torrent Proton. The sequence reads that passed quality filters were analyzed at the small RNA level with two methods: Burrows–Wheeler Aligner (BWA) followed by ANOVA (ANOVA) and TopHat followed by Cufflinks. Results: Using an optimized data analysis workflow, we mapped about 30 million sequence reads per sample to the mouse genome (build mm9) and identified 16,014 small RNA (miRNA and endo-siRNA) in the oocyte, sperm and 2PN stage of WT and Dicer cKO/Drosha cKO mice with BWA workflow and 34,115 transcripts with TopHat workflow. Approximately 47% of the miRNAs showed differential expression between the WT and Dicer cKO sperm, ~52% of miRNAs were shown dysregulated in Drosha cKO sperm compared to those in WT sperm with a fold change ≥2.0 and p value <0.05. Data analysis with BWA and TopHat workflows revealed a significant overlap yet provided complementary insights in transcriptome profiling. Conclusions: Our study represents the first detailed analysis of small non-coding RNAs (miRNAs) in sperm and demonstrated that sperm-borne small RNAs are important for fertilization and early embrynic develoment, with biologic duplicates, generated by RNA-seq technology. The optimized data analysis workflows reported here should provide a framework for comparative investigations of small RNAs profiles in mouse sperm, oocytes and 2PN stage of embryos. Our results show that NGS offers a comprehensive and more accurate quantitative and qualitative evaluation of small RNA contents within sperm or oocytes/embryos. We conclude that RNA-seq based small RNAs characterization in gametes would expedite genetic network analyses and permit the dissection of complex biologic functions during fertilization and embryonic development.

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A Restricted Role for Sperm-borne MicroRNAs in Mammalian Fertilization

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