April 21, 2023

Very excited about this manuscript, from a long-term collaboration with the lab of Michal Rabani. Establishing cell-type-specific gene expression programs is a major part of the process of development. While we know that cell-type-specific transcription plays a major role, we wanted to understand whether cell-type-specific differences in degradation of maternally loaded mRNAs (which are initially ubiquitous) additionally played a role. We developed an approach to label and distinguish maternal and zygotic mRNAs in Drop-seq single-cell RNAseq and built kinetic models to follow the rate of degradation of maternal mRNAs in different cell types. Primordial germ cells have long been known to selectively stabilize some maternal mRNAs, but we find evidence that the enveloping layer (another cell type that becomes distinct very early in development) may also employ this mechanism, in addition to cell-type-specific transcription.

Read it at bioRxiv!