Title
Intraflagellar transport is essential for mammalian spermiogenesis but is absent in mature sperm
UMMS Affiliation
Program in Molecular Medicine; Department of Cell and Developmental Biology
Publication Date
2015-12-01
Document Type
Article
Disciplines
Cell Biology
Abstract
Drosophila sperm are unusual in that they do not require the intraflagellar transport (IFT) system for assembly of their flagella. In the mouse, the IFT proteins are very abundant in testis, but we here show that mature sperm are completely devoid of them, making the importance of IFT to mammalian sperm development unclear. To address this question, we characterized spermiogenesis and fertility in the Ift88(Tg737Rpw) mouse. This mouse has a hypomorphic mutation in the gene encoding the IFT88 subunit of the IFT particle. This mutation is highly disruptive to ciliary assembly in other organs. Ift88(-/-) mice are completely sterile. They produce approximately 350-fold fewer sperm than wild-type mice, and the remaining sperm completely lack or have very short flagella. The short flagella rarely have axonemes but assemble ectopic microtubules and outer dense fibers and accumulate improperly assembled fibrous sheath proteins. Thus IFT is essential for the formation but not the maintenance of mammalian sperm flagella.
Keywords
cell motility
Rights and Permissions
Copyright © 2015 San Agustin et al. This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). Two months after publication it is available to the public under an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0).
DOI of Published Version
10.1091/mbc.E15-08-0578
Source
Mol Biol Cell. 2015 Dec 1;26(24):4358-72. doi: 10.1091/mbc.E15-08-0578. Epub 2015 Sep 30. Link to article on publisher's site.
Journal/Book/Conference Title
Molecular biology of the cell
Related Resources
PubMed ID
26424803
Repository Citation
San Agustin, Jovenal T.; Pazour, Gregory J.; and Witman, George B., "Intraflagellar transport is essential for mammalian spermiogenesis but is absent in mature sperm" (2015). Cell and Developmental Biology Publications. 190.
https://escholarship.umassmed.edu/cellbiology_pp/190
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.