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Epigenetics

Keeping one's sex

Nature volume 509, pages 430–431 (2014)Cite this article

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Progeny of the protist Paramecium tetraurelia always retain the parental mating type. This inheritance is revealed to result from an RNA-guided DNA-deletion pathway that protects the genome from foreign DNA sequences. See Article p.447

Opposites attract. For the unicellular organism Paramecium tetraurelia, those opposites are two distinct mating types, called even (E) and odd (O). Sex between E and O cells occurs by conjugation, a reversible cell fusion during which cell partners exchange genetic material before re-separating into progeny cells. Although these offspring all start development with identical, mixed genomes, each cell somehow retains the mating type of its parent: E begets E, and O begets O. The long-standing mystery of this specific inheritance1 has now been solved by a study on page 447 of this issue, in which Singh et al.2 report that small RNA molecules communicate mating-type-specific genetic information between parent and progeny cells.

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Figure 1: Epigenetic inheritance of mating type.

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  1. Douglas L. Chalker is in the Department of Biology, Washington University in St. Louis, St Louis, Missouri 63130, USA.,

    Douglas L. Chalker

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  1. Douglas L. Chalker
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Correspondence to Douglas L. Chalker.

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Chalker, D. Keeping one's sex. Nature 509, 430–431 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature13333

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