UMMS Affiliation

Department of Cell and Developmental Biology

Publication Date

2012-05-22

Document Type

Article

Disciplines

Cell Biology | Developmental Biology | Molecular Biology | Molecular Genetics | Musculoskeletal Diseases | Nervous System Diseases

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Caenorhabditis elegans sarcomeres have been studied extensively utilizing both forward and reverse genetic techniques to provide insight into muscle development and the mechanisms behind muscle contraction. A previous genetic screen investigating early muscle development produced 13 independent mutant genes exhibiting a Pat (paralyzed and arrested elongation at the two-fold length of embryonic development) muscle phenotype. This study reports the identification and characterization of one of those genes, pat-9.

RESULTS: Positional cloning, reverse genetics, and plasmid rescue experiments were used to identify the predicted C. elegans gene T27B1.2 (recently named ztf-19) as the pat-9 gene. Analysis of pat-9 showed it is expressed early in development and within body wall muscle lineages, consistent with a role in muscle development and producing a Pat phenotype. However, unlike most of the other known Pat gene family members, which encode structural components of muscle attachment sites, PAT-9 is an exclusively nuclear protein. Analysis of the predicted PAT-9 amino acid sequence identified one putative nuclear localization domain and three C2H2 zinc finger domains. Both immunocytochemistry and PAT-9::GFP fusion expression confirm that PAT-9 is primarily a nuclear protein and chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) experiments showed that PAT-9 is present on certain gene promoters.

CONCLUSIONS: We have shown that the T27B1.2 gene is pat-9. Considering the Pat-9 mutant phenotype shows severely disrupted muscle attachment sites despite PAT-9 being a nuclear zinc finger protein and not a structural component of muscle attachment sites, we propose that PAT-9 likely functions in the regulation of gene expression for some necessary structural or regulatory component(s) of the muscle attachment sites.

Keywords

Sarcomere, Muscle, Zinc finger, Pat

Rights and Permissions

Copyright ©2012 Liu et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

DOI of Published Version

10.1186/2045-3701-2-18

Source

Cell Biosci. 2012 May 22;2(1):18. doi: 10.1186/2045-3701-2-18. Link to article on publisher's site

Journal/Book/Conference Title

Cell and bioscience

Comments

At the time of publication, Peter Jones and Takako Jones were not yet affiliated with the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Related Resources

Link to Article in PubMed

PubMed ID

22616817

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