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How to lose your inheritance

In developing embryos, molecular and physical differences divide the cells that will form eggs or sperm and those that will form the body. The mouse protein OTX2 directs this decision by blocking reproductive-cell fate.
  1. Diana J. Laird

    1. Diana J. Laird is in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Science, University of California, San Francisco, and at the Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research, San Francisco, California 94143, USA.

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In an ultimate act of family planning, the cells destined to contribute to the next generation of an organism are set aside early in embryonic development. It is unclear why primordial germ cells (PGCs), the precursors of eggs and sperm, are established so early in the development of many multicellular organisms. This process of establishing the germ line involves both preventing a non-reproductive-cell (somatic-cell) fate and activating a cellular state known as pluripotency — the ability to give rise to the many different cell types in the body. Understanding how the germ line forms is a key requirement for the goal of generating healthy eggs and sperm in vitro for fertility treatment in the clinic. Work in this area has focused mainly on identifying proteins that specify germline fate, but comparatively little is known about why somatic cells do not acquire such a fate. Writing in Nature, Zhang et al.1 reveal that the formation of PGCs in mice can be blocked by a protein called OTX2.

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Nature 562, 497-498 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-06849-5

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