Description
TitleThe sea urchin seawi and other argonaute family of proteins
Date Created2013
Other Date2013-05 (degree)
Extentxi, 241 p. : ill.
DescriptionA fundamental question in studying embryonic development is to understand the regulation and integration of major developmental events, such as cell proliferation, cell specialization, cell interaction, and cell movement. Regulation of protein transcription, translation, and signaling during development can be modeled by the developmental gene regulatory network (GRN). In the sea urchin GRN, the animal-vegetal axis is established by polarized expression or localization of cell-fate determinants, such as beta-catenin nuclear localization in vegetal cells and bep4 expression in animal cells. Over the last decade, the discovery of small non-coding RNA as an effector of epigenetic, post-transcriptional, and translational regulation has led to reconsideration of the GRN. In this thesis, we investigated the role of argonaute/piwi and their association with small non-coding RNA in sea urchin development. We characterized the sea urchin argonaute/piwi proteins, examining their developmental expression profiles, characterizing the proteins present in seawi-associated MT-RNP complexes, and examining the small non-coding RNA populations in eggs, embryos, adult tissues, and MT-RNP complexes. We show seawi, sea urchin piwi, is expressed in germline lineage and stem cells in development, and seawi predominately associates with piRNA. Within the seawi-associated population of piRNAs, there are specific sets of piRNA sequences, which are complementary to the mRNA of cell-fate determinants bep4 and beta-catenin. These results lead to the potential for small non-coding RNA regulation of GRNs in sea urchin development. We also show that mi- and piRNAs are present in sea urchin sperm. This suggests that sperm has the ability to provide small non-coding RNAs to regulate embryonic developmental events. This finding challenges the current theory of sperm serving only as the delivery system for the paternal genome and provides new insight for a novel paternal regulation.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
NoteIncludes vita
Noteby Ling-shiang Chuang
Genretheses, ETD doctoral
Languageeng
CollectionGraduate School - Newark Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
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