MAEL-dependent selective processing of pachytene piRNA precursors and translation of spermiogenic mRNAs
Transcriptomics Dataset
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General Information
AccessionGSE50983
TitleMAEL-dependent selective processing of pachytene piRNA precursors and translation of spermiogenic mRNAs
DescriptionPiwi-interacting small RNAs (piRNAs) of fetal prospermatogonia of mice have been strongly implicated in transposon control. In contrast, little is known about biogenesis and function of abundant piRNAs from adult testes expressed in late spermatocytes and round spermatids. These so-called 'pachytene' piRNAs are processed from long non-coding piRNA precursors and have no defined RNA targets in the transcriptome even though their binding partner Piwi, MIWI, is essential for spermiogenesis and fertility. Here we report that 129SvJae mice lacking Maelstrom (MAEL), a conserved piRNA pathway protein, exhibit spermiogenic arrest with defects in acrosome and flagellum formation. Further analysis revealed MAEL association with RNPs containing MIWI, TDRD6, and processed intermediates of pachytene piRNA precursors of various length. Loss of MAEL causes a 10-fold drop in pachytene piRNA levels but an increase in piRNAs from abundantly expressed mRNAs. These results suggest a MAEL-dependent mechanism for the selective processing of pachytene piRNA precursor into piRNAs. Strikingly, ribosome profiling of Mael-null testes revealed that reduced piRNA production is accompanied by reduced translation of over 800 spermiogenic mRNAs including those encoding acrosome and flagellum proteins. In light of recent reports of piRNA-independent protection of translationally repressed mRNPs by MIWI and piRNA-dependent turnover of MIWI, we propose that pachytene piRNAs function by controlling the availably of MIWI for the translational repression of spermiogenic mRNAs.
Landing Pagehttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/query/acc.cgi?acc=GSE50983
RepositoryGene Expression Omnibus
Tools used to analyze the dataset

Dataset Accession

ARCHS4
Published September 2017
ARCHS4 provides access to gene counts from HiSeq 2000 and HiSeq 2500 platforms for human and mouse experiments from GEO ...
4645
Clustergrammer
Published October 2017
Web-based tool for visualizing and analyzing high-dimensional data as interactive and shareable heatmaps
4645
Canned Analyses generated with the dataset

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Interactive heatmap visualization of RNA-seq dataset GSE50983
Highly interactive web-based heatmap visualization of the top 500 most variable genes in t...
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