Antagonistic control of C. elegans germline stem cell proliferation and differentiation by PUF proteins FBF-1 and FBF-2
Abstract
Stem cells support tissue maintenance, but the mechanisms that coordinate the rate of stem cell self-renewal with differentiation at a population level remain uncharacterized. We find that two PUF family RNA-binding proteins FBF-1 and FBF-2 have opposite effects on C. elegans germline stem cell dynamics: FBF-1 restricts the rate of meiotic entry, while FBF-2 promotes both cell division and meiotic entry rates. Antagonistic effects of FBFs are mediated by their distinct activities towards the shared set of target mRNAs, where FBF-1-mediated post-transcriptional control requires the activity of CCR4-NOT deadenylase, while FBF-2 is deadenylase-independent and might protect the targets from deadenylation. These regulatory differences depend on protein sequences outside of the conserved PUF family RNA-binding domain. We propose that the opposing FBF-1 and FBF-2 activities serve to modulate stem cell division rate simultaneously with the rate of meiotic entry.
Data availability
All data generated or analysed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Institute of General Medical Sciences (GM109053)
- Ekaterina Voronina
National Institute of General Medical Sciences (P20GM103546)
- Ekaterina Voronina
American Heart Association (18PRE34070028)
- Xiaobo Wang
Montana Academy of Sciences
- Xiaobo Wang
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2020, Wang et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 1,928
- views
-
- 205
- downloads
-
- 16
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Citations by DOI
-
- 16
- citations for umbrella DOI https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.52788