Title
C. elegans PAT-9 is a nuclear zinc finger protein critical for the assembly of muscle attachments
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
Related Resources
PubMed ID
22616817
Repository Citation
Liu, Qian; Jones, Takako I.; Bachmann, Rebecca A.; Meghpara, Mitchell; Rogowski, Lauren; Williams, Benjamin D.; and Jones, Peter L., "C. elegans PAT-9 is a nuclear zinc finger protein critical for the assembly of muscle attachments" (2012). Peter Jones Lab Publications. 18.
https://escholarship.umassmed.edu/peterjones/18
Included in
Cell Biology Commons, Developmental Biology Commons, Molecular Biology Commons, Molecular Genetics Commons, Musculoskeletal Diseases Commons, Nervous System Diseases Commons
Comments
At the time of publication, Peter Jones and Takako Jones were not yet affiliated with the University of Massachusetts Medical School.