0000000000376798
AUTHOR
A.m. Rinaldi
Regulation of Macromolecular Synthesis during Sea Urchin Development
Immediately following fertilization the sea urchin egg enters a period of very rapid cell division that cleaves the egg cell into about one thousand proportionately smaller cells, which form the swimming blastula, i.e. a larval form that is less vulnerable to environmental injuries since it is capable of actively swimming away from them.
The nucleus negatively controls the synthesis of mitochondrial proteins in the sea urchin egg.
Enucleation of Paracentrotus lividus eggs, followed by parthenogenetic activation induces a sharp increase in the synthesis of mitochondrial proteins as shown by electrofluorography after in vivo labeling with radioactive amino acids. These results further substantiate the hypothesis that the cell nucleus negatively controls mitochondrial replication in the sea urchin egg.
Replication origins and pause sites in sea urchin mitochondrial DNA
We have used a combination of one- and two-dimensional agarose gel electrophoresis, and solution hybridization to strand-specific probes, to map the replication origin of sea urchin mitochondrial DNA and to investigate the structure of replication intermediates. These assays are consistent with replication initiating unidirectionally from the D-loop region by D-loop expansion, as in vertebrates. A prominent site of initiation of lagging-strand synthesis lies at, or near to, the boundary between the genes for ATPase 6 and COIII, which is also close to a pause site for leading-strand synthesis. These findings suggest a role for pause sites in the regulation of mitochondrial transcription and …
The dynamics of structural modifications of mitochondria at the early stages of sea urchin embryonic development
The organization of the chondriome and the ultrastructure of mitochondria have been studied in eggs and embryos of the sea urchin Paracentrotus lividus. The egg chondriome is characterized by an arrangement in well-delimited clusters. Analysis of mitochondrial clusters on electron micrographs of ultrathin serial sections shows two kinds of mitochondria of different shapes, the rod-shaped and the spherical. The egg mitochondria have a dense matrix and a well-ordered arrangement of cristae which, in rod-shaped variety, are perpendicular to the major axis. Cell division is accompanied by significant changes in intracellular distribution of mitochondria and in their structure. At the stage of 2…