Full text

Turn on search term navigation

© 2022 Nuckolls et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.

Abstract

Meiotic drivers bias gametogenesis to ensure their transmission into more than half the offspring of a heterozygote. In Schizosaccharomyces pombe, wtf meiotic drivers destroy the meiotic products (spores) that do not inherit the driver from a heterozygote, thereby reducing fertility. wtf drivers encode both a Wtfpoison protein and a Wtfantidote protein using alternative transcriptional start sites. Here, we analyze how the expression and localization of the Wtf proteins are regulated to achieve drive. We show that transcriptional timing and selective protein exclusion from developing spores ensure that all spores are exposed to Wtf4poison, but only the spores that inherit wtf4 receive a dose of Wtf4antidote sufficient for survival. In addition, we show that the Mei4 transcription factor, a master regulator of meiosis, controls the expression of the wtf4poison transcript. This transcriptional regulation, which includes the use of a critical meiotic transcription factor, likely complicates the universal suppression of wtf genes without concomitantly disrupting spore viability. We propose that these features contribute to the evolutionary success of the wtf drivers.

Details

Title
S . pombe wtf drivers use dual transcriptional regulation and selective protein exclusion from spores to cause meiotic drive
Author
Nicole L. Nuckolls https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1487-2793; Mok, Anthony C; Rachel M. Helston https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6022-6755; María Angélica Bravo Núñez Current address: Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, United States of America https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6554-8814; Jeffrey J. Lange https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4970-6269; Todd J. Gallagher https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3971-0221; Chris W. Seidel https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9218-7922; Sarah E. Zanders https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1867-986X
First page
e1009847
Section
Research Article
Publication year
2022
Publication date
Dec 2022
Publisher
Public Library of Science
ISSN
15537390
e-ISSN
15537404
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
2766098372
Copyright
© 2022 Nuckolls et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.