Argonaute catalytic activity is required for maternal mRNA clearance in embryos

Piergiuseppe Quarato (1, 2) , Meetali Singh (2) , Eric Cornes (2) , Blaise Maxime Li (3, 2) , Loan Bourdon (2) , Celine Didier (2) , Germano Cecere (2)

1 Collège Doctoral
2 Mécanismes de l'Hérédité épigénétique / Mechanisms of epigenetic inheritance
3 Hub Bioinformatique et Biostatistique - Bioinformatics and Biostatistics HUB

Argonaute proteins and their interacting small RNAs play a key role in regulating complementary mRNA targets during animal development. Here, we investigate a novel and essential function of the catalytically active Argonaute protein CSR-1 in maternal mRNA degradation during early embryogenesis in Caenorhabditis elegans. We show that CSR-1 interacts with endogenous small RNAs antisense to hundreds of cleared maternal mRNAs in embryos, and preferentially cleaves mRNAs no longer engaged in translation. The depletion of CSR-1 during maternal to zygotic transition leads to embryonic lethality in a catalytic-dependent manner and impairs the degradations of its embryonic mRNA targets. Given the conservation of Argonaute catalytic activity, we propose that a similar mechanism operate to clear maternal mRNAs during maternal to zygotic transition across species.

Domains: Life Sciences [q-bio]; Biochemistry, Molecular Biology; Genomics [q-bio.GN]; Life Sciences [q-bio]; Quantitative Methods [q-bio.QM]; Life Sciences [q-bio]; Development Biology; Embryology and Organogenesis

Piergiuseppe Quarato, Meetali Singh, Eric Cornes, Blaise Maxime Li, Loan Bourdon, et al.. Argonaute catalytic activity is required for maternal mRNA clearance in embryos. 2020. ⟨pasteur-02626442⟩