Tsinghua-Peking Center for Life Sciences, Beijing Frontier Research Center for Biological Structure, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, School of Life Sciences and MOE Key Laboratory for Protein Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China.
Department of Neurosurgery, Huashan Hospital, the Shanghai Key Laboratory of Medical Epigenetics, Institutes of Biomedical Sciences, State Key Laboratory of Medical Neurobiology and MOE Frontiers Center for Brain Science, National Center for Neurological Disorders, School of Basic Medical Sciences, Fudan University, Shanghai, 200032, China.
Sci China Life Sci. 2023 Oct;66(10):2342-2353. doi: 10.1007/s11427-022-2332-5. Epub 2023 May 6.
Sperm contributes essential paternal factors, including the paternal genome, centrosome, and oocyte-activation signals, to sexual reproduction. However, it remains unresolved how sperm contributes its RNA molecules to regulate early embryonic development. Here, we show that the Caenorhabditis elegans paternal protein SPE-11 assembles into granules during meiotic divisions of spermatogenesis and later matures into a perinuclear structure where sperm RNAs localize. We reconstitute an SPE-11 liquid-phase scaffold in vitro and find that SPE-11 condensates incorporate the nematode RNA, which, in turn, promotes SPE-11 phase separation. Loss of SPE-11 does not affect sperm motility or fertilization but causes pleiotropic development defects in early embryos, and spe-11 mutant males reduce mRNA levels of genes crucial for an oocyte-to-embryo transition or embryonic development. These results reveal that SPE-11 undergoes phase separation and associates with sperm RNAs that are delivered to oocytes during fertilization, providing insights into how a paternal protein regulates early embryonic development.
精子为有性生殖贡献了重要的父系因素，包括父系基因组、中心体和卵母细胞激活信号。然而，精子如何将其 RNA 分子贡献给调节早期胚胎发育仍然没有解决。在这里，我们显示出秀丽隐杆线虫的父系蛋白 SPE-11 在精子发生的减数分裂过程中组装成颗粒，然后成熟为一个核周结构，精子 RNA 定位于该结构。我们在体外重建了一个 SPE-11 液相支架，并发现 SPE-11 凝聚物包含线虫 RNA，反过来，促进 SPE-11 的相分离。SPE-11 的缺失不影响精子的运动能力或受精能力，但会导致早期胚胎出现多种发育缺陷，spe-11 突变雄性会降低卵母细胞到胚胎过渡或胚胎发育过程中关键基因的 mRNA 水平。这些结果表明 SPE-11 经历了相分离，并与在受精过程中被输送到卵母细胞的精子 RNA 相关，为父系蛋白如何调节早期胚胎发育提供了见解。
