Maternal microRNAs are essential for mouse zygotic development
- Fuchou Tang1,4,
- Masahiro Kaneda1,4,
- Dónal O’Carroll2,
- Petra Hajkova1,
- Sheila C. Barton1,
- Y. Andrew Sun3,
- Caroline Lee1,
- Alexander Tarakhovsky2,
- Kaiqin Lao3,6, and
- M. Azim Surani1,5
- 1 Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute of Cancer and Developmental Biology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 1QN, United Kingdom;
- 2 The Laboratory for Lymphocyte Signaling and the Laboratory of Molecular Immunology, The Rockefeller University, New York, New York 10021, USA;
- 3 Advanced Research Technology, Applied Biosystems, Foster City, California 94404, USA
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↵4 These authors contributed equally to this work.
Abstract
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) have important roles in diverse cellular processes, but little is known about their identity and functions during early mammalian development. Here, we show the effects of the loss of maternal inheritance of miRNAs following specific deletion of Dicer from growing oocytes. The mutant mature oocytes were almost entirely depleted of all miRNAs, and they failed to progress through the first cell division, probably because of disorganized spindle formation. By comparing single-cell cDNA microarray profiles of control and mutant oocytes, our data are compatible with the notion that a large proportion of the maternal genes are directly or indirectly under the control of miRNAs, which demonstrates that the maternal miRNAs are essential for the earliest stages of mouse embryonic development.
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Footnotes
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↵5 Corresponding authors.
↵5 E-MAIL as10021{at}mole.bio.cam.ac.uk; FAX 44-1223-334089.
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↵6 E-MAIL laokq{at}appliedbiosystems.com; FAX (650) 638-6343.
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Supplemental material is available at http://www.genesdev.org.
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Article is online at http://www.genesdev.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gad.418707
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- Received November 20, 2006.
- Accepted January 29, 2007.
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Freely available online through the Genes & Development Open Access option.
- Copyright © 2007, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press
