Project description:Multiple division cycles without growth are a characteristic feature of early embryogenesis. The female germline deposits proteins and RNAs into oocytes to support these divisions, which lack many of the quality control mechanisms operating in somatic cells undergoing growth. How the composition of the oocyte maternal load is regulated to ensure its ability to support early embryogenesis is not known. Here we describe a small RNA-Argonaute pathway, operating in the C. elegans germline, that ensures early embryonic divisions by employing catalytic slicing activity to broadly tune, instead of silence, germline gene expression. Misregulation of one target, a kinesin-13 microtubule depolymerase, underlies a major embryonic phenotype associated with pathway loss. Tuning of target expression is guided by small RNA density, which must ultimately be related to target sequence. Thus, C. elegans employs a single catalytic Argonaute for small RNA-mediated tuning of the mRNA levels of germline-expressed genes that support early embryogenesis. mRNA profiling of 2 replicates each for 3 genotypes of adult-stage C. elegans worms
Project description:Multiple division cycles without growth are a characteristic feature of early embryogenesis. The female germline deposits proteins and RNAs into oocytes to support these divisions, which lack many of the quality control mechanisms operating in somatic cells undergoing growth. How the composition of the oocyte maternal load is regulated to ensure its ability to support early embryogenesis is not known. Here we describe a small RNA-Argonaute pathway, operating in the C. elegans germline, that ensures early embryonic divisions by employing catalytic slicing activity to broadly tune, instead of silence, germline gene expression. Misregulation of one target, a kinesin-13 microtubule depolymerase, underlies a major embryonic phenotype associated with pathway loss. Tuning of target expression is guided by small RNA density, which must ultimately be related to target sequence. Thus, C. elegans employs a single catalytic Argonaute for small RNA-mediated tuning of the mRNA levels of germline-expressed genes that support early embryogenesis.
Project description:Germline small RNA pathways initiate silencing of repetitive elements in animals and an interplay of nuclear small RNAs and chromatin modifications maintain this silencing, protecting the germline from spreading of transposable elements. In C. elegans germline, nuclear argonaute protein HRDE-1 initiates the transcriptional silencing pathway that is crucial for long term and heritable silencing of genes and repetitive regions. Here, we show that HRDE-1 interacts with components of the splicing machinery and the exon-junction complex. One such factor is the conserved RNA helicase EMB-4/AQR that binds introns and recruits the exon-junction proteins to newly spliced RNA. Our data shows that EMB-4/AQR is required for the transcriptional silencing pathway initiated by HRDE-1 and it functions by removing the intronic barriers to silencing thorugh its helicase function.
Project description:Gene silencing mediated by dsRNA (RNAi) can persist for multiple generations in C. elegans (termed RNAi inheritance). Here we describe the results of a forward genetic screen in C. elegans that has identified six factors required for RNAi inheritance: GLH-1/VASA, PUP-1/CDE-1, MORC-1, SET-32, and two novel nematode-specific factors that we term here (heritable RNAi defective) HRDE-2 and HRDE-4. The new RNAi inheritance factors exhibit mortal germline (Mrt) phenotypes, which we show is likely caused by epigenetic deregulation in germ cells. We also show that HRDE-2 contributes to RNAi inheritance by facilitating the binding of small RNAs to the inheritance Argonaute (Ago) HRDE-1. Together, our results identify additional components of the RNAi inheritance machinery whose sequence conservation provides insights into the molecular mechanism of RNAi inheritance, further our understanding of how the RNAi inheritance machinery promotes germline immortality, and show that HRDE-2 couples the inheritance Ago HRDE-1 with the small RNAs it needs to direct RNAi inheritance and germline immortality.