Molecular Mechanisms of Primordial Germ Cells Specilization in Drosophila

Zhong-Hai Guo, Xian-Jiang Kang*, Shu-Mei Mu

(The College of Life Science, Hebei University, Baoding 071002, China)

Abstract:In most sexually reproducing animals, primordial germ cells (PGCs) are set aside from cells in early embryo development. They will give rise to gametes that are responsible for the development of a new organism. There are two kinds of models for specilization of PGCs in animal kingdom, germ plasm decision and induction. The former is taken in Drosophila. The osk gene, which has been proved to play a crucial role in germ plasm assembly, can regulate the location and translation of its downstream genes?transcripts, such as vas and tud. Besides, transcriptional silencing, as an important feature during the specilization of PGCs, is closely relative to some components of the germ plasm in Drosophila, mainly including expression product of nos, gcl and pgc. This paper simply summarizes the research progress of PGCs?specilization in Drosophila.

Key words: primordial germ cells; germ plasm; specilization

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.30371115) and Natural Science Foundation of Hebei Province (No.303118)

*Corresponding author. Tel: 86-312-5079362, Fax: 86-312-5079364, E-mail: xjkang@mail.hbu.edu.cn