Maternal Proteins That Are Phosphoregulated upon Egg Activation Include Crucial Factors for Oogenesis, Egg Activation and Embryogenesis in Drosophila melanogaster

Egg activation is essential for the successful transition from a mature oocyte to a developmentally competent egg. It consists of a series of events including the resumption and completion of meiosis, initiation of translation of some maternal mRNAs and destruction of others, and changes to the vitelline envelope. This major change of cell state is accompanied by large scale alteration in the oocyte's phosphoproteome. We hypothesize that the cohort of proteins that are subject to phosphoregulation during egg activation are functionally important for processes before, during, or soon after this transition, potentially uniquely or as proteins carrying out essential cellular functions like those they do in other (somatic) cells. In this study, we used germline-specific RNAi to examine the function of 189 maternal proteins that are phosphoregulated during egg activation in Drosophila melanogaster. We identified 53 genes whose knockdown reduced or abolished egg production and caused a range of defects in ovarian morphology, as well as 51 genes whose knockdown led to significant impairment or abolishment of the egg hatchability. We observed different stages of developmental arrest in the embryos and various defects in spindle morphology and aberrant centrosome activities in the early arrested embryos. Our results, validated by the detection of multiple genes with previously-documented maternal effect phenotypes among the proteins we tested, revealed 15 genes with newly discovered roles in egg activation and early embryogenesis in Drosophila. Given that protein phosphoregulation is a conserved characteristic of this developmental transition, we suggest that the phosphoregulated proteins may provide a rich pool of candidates for the identification of important players in the egg-to-embryo transition.

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