Genetics. Published Articles Ahead of Print: February 3, 2008, Copyright © 2008
doi:10.1534/genetics.108.086678


A more recent version of this article appeared on March 1, 2008.

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The C. elegans PcG-like gene sop-2 regulates the temporal and sexual specificities of cell fates

Qingcun cai 1, Yinyan Sun 1, Xinxin Huang 1, Cong Guo 1, Yuxia Zhang 1, Zuoyan Zhu 2 and Hong Zhang 1*

1 National Institute of Biological Sciences, Beijing
2 Peking University

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: zhanghong{at}nibs.ac.cn.

Submitted on January 2, 2008
Revised on January 5, 2008
Accepted on 5 January 2008


Abstract

How spatial, temporal and sexual specific cues are integrated to specify distinct cell fates during multicellular organism development is largely unknown. Here we demonstrate that the C. elegans PcG-like gene sop-2 determines the temporal and sexual specificities of a row of hypodermal seam cells, in addition to specifying their positional identities. Loss-of-function of sop-2 causes premature expression of adult fates at larval stages. sop-2 acts upstream of lin-29 in the heterochronic pathway and genetically interacts with other heterochronic genes in specifying the temporal fates of seam cells at different larval stages. We show that the number of ALG-1-containing P bodies is increased in seam cells in sop-2 mutants. Furthermore, the microRNA-mediated repression of a heterochronic gene reporter is enhanced in sop-2 mutants. Mutations in sop-2 also cause partial hermaphrodite to male sexual transformations. The homeotic transformations, heterochronic defects and sexual transformations can occur concomitantly in sop-2 mutants. In summary, our studies reveal that sop-2 integrates spatial, temporal and sexual cues during C. elegans development.

Key Words: C. elegans, P bodies, PcG, heterochronic gene, sex determination