Journal
MOLECULAR BIOLOGY OF THE CELL
Volume 25, Issue 8, Pages 1298-1311Publisher
AMER SOC CELL BIOLOGY
DOI: 10.1091/mbc.E13-11-0687
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- National Institutes of Health National Center for Research Resources
- National Institutes of Health [GM049869]
- National Institutes of Health
- Canadian Institute of Health Research
- American Heart Pre-doctoral Fellowship
Ask authors/readers for more resources
In many animals, including vertebrates, oocyte meiotic spindles are bipolar but assemble in the absence of centrosomes. Although meiotic spindle positioning in oocytes has been investigated extensively, much less is known about their assembly. In Caenorhabditis elegans, three genes previously shown to contribute to oocyte meiotic spindle assembly are the calponin homology domain protein encoded by aspm-1, the katanin family member mei-1, and the kinesin-12 family member klp-18. We isolated temperature-sensitive alleles of all three and investigated their requirements using live-cell imaging to reveal previously undocumented requirements for aspm-1 and mei-1. Our results indicate that bipolar but abnormal oocyte meiotic spindles assemble in aspm-1(-) embryos, whereas klp-18(-) and mei-1(-) mutants assemble monopolar and apolar spindles, respectively. Furthermore, two MEI-1 functions-ASPM-1 recruitment to the spindle and microtubule severing-both contribute to monopolar spindle assembly in klp-18(-) mutants. We conclude that microtubule severing and ASPM-1 both promote meiotic spindle pole assembly in C. elegans oocytes, whereas the kinesin 12 family member KLP-18 promotes spindle bipolarity.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available